It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)
Authors: Ferguson Stuart 
Published: February 2015

Maybe I am just getting old. Or spending too much time in the company of grumpy people. Or both. Nevertheless, it seems to me that I spend an increasing amount of time discussing, in a suitably serious and concerned fashion, the challenges facing the oil industry. The topics are appropriately weighty, such as how the industry will meet the growing energy demands of the world economy against a backdrop of increasing constraints.

In the shorter term, in my mind at least, reserves seem not to be the issue. The concern is more about producing, on a daily basis, the volumes of oil needed to fuel the world. And doing this while decline rates are increasing because of poorer-quality reservoirs needing more productive wells to pull forward as much oil as possible—and furthermore, getting this production from reservoirs located in increasingly inhospitable places. Even if we do manage to produce and burn all of this oil, the planet may drown, somewhat ironically, because of global warming. Whether this is true or not, there is a perception that environmental concerns are increasingly important and, in many developed countries at least, this is constraining the industry. Beyond regulatory issues, the misplaced perception of the industry as a major polluter further tarnishes an already fairly blackened image. Consequently, the industry struggles to attract adequate talent in many of its traditional recruiting grounds.

In line with this tendency toward weighty issues, this past summer I attended the SPE Executive Summit on Talent and Technology. What happened at the event will have been described elsewhere, and is not the subject of this article. However, at the conference I bumped into a former colleague with whom I had worked in the early 1990s. We spent a few minutes reminiscing and, after we had parted company, the rejuvenation of some of these memories provided me with a lot of food for thought.

At the time I worked as a petroleum engineer in BP's Northern Fields group in the UK. Many of the fields in this group were already old and tired, and those that were not were pretty difficult, at least by the standards of the time. However, the combination of the challenges of operating these fields, together with the nature of the people working on them, produced a culture of innovation that both inspired me and strongly influenced my subsequent career. My immediate boss at the time—better described as my mentor—never grew tired of telling me that most production technology issues could be solved by nothing more than "schoolboy physics" and a little lateral thinking. In reality, I worked as part of an integrated team of engineers and chemists in which technical rigor was expected—failing in this aspect could lead to public humiliation—and innovation was both encouraged and supported. Some of the systems we designed were bizarre (an inverted gas lift completion including a sausage-shaped bubble maker); some were futuristic (a supersonic gas-powered jet pump—one of my pet projects, and a resounding failure); but most were creative, and practical, solutions to accelerating and maximizing oil recovery.