bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
SPE: A 1957 Snapshot
Authors: Shillings Erica 
Published: February 2015

The year 1957 was a time of advancement in technology, science, and education around the world. On 16 January, three B-52s took off from Castle Air Force Base in California on the first nonstop, round-the-world flight by jet plane, which lasted 45 hours and 19 minutes. The "space age" began on 4 October when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made space satellite. This led to the US's first attempt at putting a satellite into orbit, which failed when Vanguard TV-3 blew up on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 6 December 1957. The complete microscopic theory of superconductivity was proposed in 1957 by John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer, and the Treaty of Rome was signed by France, West Germany, Italy, and Benelux, establishing the European Economic Community.
In medicine, there were several breakthroughs, such as the invention of the temporary artificial heart by Willem Kolff. Alick Isaacs and Jean Lindemann produced interferon, and the internal pacemaker was created by Clarence W. Lillehie and Earl Bakk. Less dramatic events that year included the introduction of the electric watch by Hamilton Watch Company and the Frisbee by Wham-O, and a patent was awarded for Velcro.
Among these historical moments in politics, science, and popular culture came the official creation of SPE. John P. Hammond, 1957 President of the SPE of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (AIME), led the society through its first year of transformation. Hammond, who had graduated from the University of Tulsa, was Assistant General Superintendent of the Production Department of Amerada at the time. Since joining AIME in 1938, he held numerous chairman positions within local sections and committees.
In the beginning, SPE meetings were held only in the US and Caracas, Venezuela, and most meetings took place in Texas and Louisiana, where the oil business was thriving. As membership increased, meetings cropped up in places such as Montana, California, and West Virginia, with meeting locations dependent on local section support. To hold a meeting, a section or a sufficient number of members needed to be able to sponsor and prepare the event. SPE's meeting schedule in 1957 was as follows:14–15 February, Joint Annual Technical Meeting, University of Texas and A&M College of Texas, Austin, Texas24–28 February, AIME Annual Meeting, New Orleans18–19 April, Permian Basin Oil Recovery Conference, Midland, Texas23–24 May, Third Annual Joint Meeting, Rocky Mountain Petroleum Sections, Billings, Montana6–9 October, SPE of AIME Annual Fall Meeting, Dallas17–18 October, Southern California Petroleum Section Fall Meeting, Los Angeles17–18 October, Second Annual Conference of the Electrical and Radioactivity Logging Oil Institute, Abilene, Texas6–9 November, Second Annual Regional Meeting, Venezuela Petroleum Sections, Caracas8–9 November, Central Appalachian Section Annual Meeting, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia
SPE Award Namesakes Were Leaders in the Industry
Authors: Shillings Erica 
Published: February 2015

SPE confers 18 honors and awards that recognize members' technical and professional excellence as well as their contributions to the society, the engineering profession, and their communities. Five awards have become synonymous with AIME and SPE and are named in honor of individuals who made singular contributions to the industry.

Anthony F. Lucas Gold Medal
The Anthony F. Lucas Gold Medal, established by AIME in 1936, is awarded to individuals for distinguished achievement in improving the technique and practice of finding and producing petroleum. There have been 62 recipients of the award since its inception. The medal was named for Captain Anthony F. Lucas, who is associated with the famous Spindletop gusher near Beaumont, Texas, and was the first chairman of AIME's Oil and Gas Committee, the forerunner to what eventually would become SPE.
Often referred to as the "father of petroleum engineering," Lucas was born Antun Lucic on the coast of Dalmatia in 1855. He graduated from the Polytechnic Institute in Graz and entered the Austrian Naval Academy. He rose to the rank of second lieutenant but took a 6 months' leave of absence in 1879 to visit an uncle in Saginaw, Michigan. Lucas found employment in the lumber country and secured a second leave from his naval service. At the end of 1880, he decided to remain in the United States and changed his name to Anthony Francis Lucas. He married Caroline Weed Fitzgerald in 1887 and moved to Washington, DC. Their son, Anthony Fitzgerald Lucas, was born in 1892.
A mechanical and mining engineer, Lucas went from Colorado to Louisiana in search of gold, salt, and sulfur deposits. From 1893 to 1896, he supervised salt-mining operations in Louisiana for a New Orleans company. In drills at Anse la Butte, Belle Isle, and Grand Cote (Weeks Island), he found traces of salt deposits and oil characteristic of the salt domes of the Gulf of Mexico coast. He explored the salt dome structures in the southern states, and by the time he arrived in Beaumont, Lucas had an extensive knowledge of salt domes and sulfur deposits.
Pattillo Higgins was responsible for attracting Lucas to Beaumont. In 1899, Lucas answered an advertisement for a drilling contractor position placed by Higgins. Lucas was searching primarily for sulfur, but he also knew that there was a possibility that the Spindletop mound—a piercement-type salt dome similar to those along the Louisiana coastal region—contained oil. Lucas and Higgins got a lease/purchase agreement from the Gladys City Company for 663 acres south of Beaumont at Spindletop. In a separate agreement, Lucas retained a 90% interest for funding the search, and Higgins was given a 10% interest.
Although Lucas located traces of oil, he found drilling extremely difficult, and his light equipment collapsed after reaching a depth of 575 ft. With funds dwindling, Lucas looked toward John Galey and James Guffey for financial support. Galey, Guffey, and Lucas worked out an agreement for financing.
Fifty Years of Change in the Petroleum Engineering Profession
Authors: Lord Ron 
Published: February 2015

Without a doubt, the petroleum engineers of today are very different from those of yesteryear. They are trained differently, think differently, operate differently, and use a different tool kit from that of their predecessors. Some of the changes in the profession are obvious, such as the availability of a more sophisticated tool kit and the presence of women in every facet of the business. Other changes have been more subtle, including engineers' attitude toward their profession, improved communications skills, and the rise of information overload.

Women Join the Ranks
One of the most profound changes in petroleum engineering since 1957 has been the participation of female engineers in a career field that had been overwhelmingly male. Exceedingly rare 50 years ago, female engineers and managers are now common.
"Our industry is still underserved by the female half of society, but it is a far cry from the 1950s and before," said James Pappas, Global Technology Director for Devon Energy and SPE's Technical Director for Production and Operations. "Now more than ever, women are needed in the workforce because the industry has never been so short on engineers. To have excluded half of the population in the past from such an important career amounts to nothing less than a huge case of short-sightedness by the industry."
Many of the first wave of women entering the profession were themselves daughters of oilmen, who encouraged them to pursue careers in petroleum while simultaneously cautioning the young women that the oil patch could indeed be a difficult place for them to work and succeed. Some of the obstacles included the difficulty of accommodating both men and women on offshore rigs, and sometimes women were not welcome by the wives of men working aboard a drilling and production platform offshore.
"Equality legislation during the 1970s and early 1980s did much to open doors for women and other minorities in our profession," says C.O. (Doc) Stokley, vice president of R&D for TAM International and a 42-year veteran petroleum engineer. "The result has been a much smoother path for women and other minority engineers during the past several decades."
The Move to Teamwork Depending on the culture of the company, some engineers during the 1950s and 1960s began to be exposed to multiple disciplines, such as drilling, completions, workover, fracturing, production, reservoir, and other areas in an effort to broaden their knowledge and experience. But other companies believed it was better for engineers to focus on a single discipline. By the end of the 1970s, the industry was a mix of specialists and multidiscipline generalists. This period also brought closer together the exploration and production sides of the business.
The Hidden Treasures Stored in SPE's Technical Paper Archive
Authors: Beliveau Dennis 
Published: February 2015

There I was, 21 years old, standing at the base of the tower and staring up 33 floors to the top of Shell Centre. Kind of symbolic—starting my career and visualizing the long climb ahead. Just another new graduate from the University of Saskatchewan working in Calgary as a reservoir engineer. I felt daunted by all the very smart and very experienced people around me. And, like all my young and eager friends, I too wanted to load up my resume with as much experience as possible, and as soon as possible. But how to do that? The big projects that we worked on as parts of a multidisciplinary team were exciting and great learning opportunities, but they developed over a long time, and time is something young folks are impatient about.
But as part of my normal work routine, I soon was exposed to the amazing treasure trove of SPE publications. I found that if you read a paper carefully, and followed its trail of references, and then followed the references in the references, you started to get a good perspective on the technical breadth and depth of our industry. If you read all the papers on a sub-topic, it would lead you to another related topic, and so on. Even though Shell, for example, had an excellent library of technical materials and case histories, nothing could match the SPE paper archives. So I started to use the SPE library as my own personal "experience accelerator."
Getting into that mountain of SPE papers might appear an overwhelming task, if you think about it. The society has a library of almost 50,000 papers, which is why my advice to young engineers is not to think about it. But for argument's sake, let's say that about 20% of the papers pertain to your particular field of interest. At one paper per day, and allowing for weekends and vacations, it would take you only 40 years to get through the papers in your technical area ("Forty years? Are you kidding me?") OK, say that only about 20% of the papers in your technical area are the ones you really need to read, but let's also remember that reading and properly digesting even two or three papers per week is a lot of work. So realistically, it might take you only 15 years of reading ("Fifteen years?" "Yeah, that's right, kid, and unfortunately, another 20,000 papers will get published while you were reading, so don't expect to ever get finished. Ever hear of Sisyphus?").
Drilling in 2032 - Back to the Future
Authors: Thorogood John 
Published: February 2015

Studying the evolution of drilling technology with the benefit of hindsight reveals many surprises. Things never turn out as foreseen; our predictions are rarely accurate. Progress appears random. Novel developments appear out of the blue. This article explores some examples of technology evolution and considers its implications for the future.

We Have the Technology We Deserve
Looking at the cyclical booms and busts of the drilling industry over the last 35 years, activity has gone from full speed ahead to full stop on several occasions. We have witnessed a withdrawal by most majors and government from the basic research that gave us the technologies we now enjoy. Innovation is now mainly confined to the service sector, but is thereby constrained by the demands of market need. Although oil-company and service-sector support for academia is growing, fundamental research is lacking, and what is done resembles technical service work. The lack of investment makes faculty positions unattractive to qualified professionals, to the detriment of teaching quality and future research.
As our workforce has matured, engineering has ceased to be analytic and has instead become heavily experience-based. In this environment, the new generation of engineers cannot develop the vital discipline of analytic rigor and problem solving. Complex problems are "solved" using sophisticated software tools, but the users can struggle to describe the engineering principles of the codes they employ. Answers emerge through a consensus of opinion-driven work groups. The spark of investigative creativity is hard to discern in an industry dominated by routine factory engineering.
The understanding behind novel developments, such as casing drilling, evolves empirically rather than from systematic research. Opinions abound, but because there are no peer-reviewed papers describing the science of why it works, nobody knows what opportunities the industry is foregoing to push limits further, or to solve other seemingly intractable problems.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Lord Browne, then head of BP's Exploration arm, rejected the idea of a field development involving an artificial island in the middle of a recreation area. Faced with the stimulus of having to do something dramatically different, the organization pulled together disparate but well-understood strands of drilling technology and demonstrated that, counter to the prevailing wisdom, drilling extended-reach wells to horizontal displacements of 10 km or more was feasible. The Wytch Farm project was approved. The rest is history.

There Is Nothing New in the Oil Field
As a young engineer proposing new ideas, it was demoralizing to be told by one's seniors that they had seen it all before. However, in one sense, they were right. There is nothing new in the oil field. The oil field is littered with visionary false starts. Recent history abounds with radical innovations that were previously tried out and failed because the concepts were too far ahead of their time.
1990-2007: Toward the Future
Authors: Donnelly John 
Published: February 2015

During the 1990s, SPE took significant steps to ensure that it remained valuable to the practicing petroleum professional. It became truly international, continuing the mission that had begun more than 2 decades earlier; it opened offices outside the US and broadened board representation to enhance global member needs and services; it expanded programming to keep up with demographic and technological changes sweeping the industry; and it entered the electronic age, streamlining internal processes and giving the industry a powerful and effective Web tool.
The next decade and a half would see SPE broadening its presence on the ground throughout the world. In 1990, the SPE Board voted to open an office in London to coordinate activities in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India. At the end of 1981, SPE had 3,837 members, excluding students, in these regions—just under 10% of total membership. But by year-end 1990, membership in those regions had almost tripled and now represented 21.5% of total membership. During the same period, membership in the US had declined more than 5%. An office in Kuala Lumpur would open in 1995 to improve member services in the growing Asia region, and an office in Dubai to bolster Middle East activities would follow in 2003. This year, SPE will open an office in Russia.
That international trend was borne out in total membership growth as well. Overall membership grew by a third in the 1980s, despite the severe industry contraction, thanks to non-US growth. Total membership rose from 38,799 in 1980 to 51,586 at the end of 1990. Non-US membership more than doubled, from 7,876 in 1980 to 17,127 at the end of 1990. Members residing in countries other than the US now represented a third of total membership, and international growth would continue in the new decade. Eight new sections from seven countries and five new student chapters received charters in 1990, for example, putting the total number of countries with SPE sections or student chapters at 41. Among the new sections formed were ones in Mexico, Germany, Nigeria, Congo, and Bombay, India. New student chapters were formed in the United Arab Emirates and Yugoslavia. International growth was increasingly reflected in the makeup of SPE programs and services.
But perhaps the most symbolic event representing this trend came in 1991, when the society's Nominating Committee selected Jacques Bosio to become 1993 SPE President. Bosio, an executive with Elf Aquitaine Production in Paris, would become SPE's first non-US president.
"SPE was perceived as 100% US at one time, but it was opening new sections every year outside the US and appeared to be going in that direction," recalls Bosio, who had helped establish the SPE France Section in the early 1980s. "Fortunately, some presidents before me, such as Orville Gaither and Kenneth Robbins, had vision and realized that the center of gravity of the oil business was moving east.
The Challenge for the E&P Industry - A New Wave of Innovation
Authors: Millheim Keith K. 
Published: February 2015

Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a paper titled "The New Engineering Paradigm and the Emergence of Investigative Engineering" and presented it at the 1988 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in Houston. Later, in August 1989, the paper was printed as an article in JPT. When the article first came out, it created quite a stir. And, as I mentioned in the article, I did not expect everyone to agree with a lot of what I had to say. Many did not. The article was com-posed to stimulate the thinking of how we engineers really function in an organization and to introduce the concept of investigative engineering.
Over the years, I have had some conversations and correspondence about the article, but, with the flow of time, the interest in the topic seemed to wane. That is not unexpected, because the shelf life of most articles is short. However, a longtime colleague of mine who works for a major oil company recently sent me an email saying that he raised the article from the archives and explained the relevance it had in some discussions with his management about engineer-ing. The email tweaked my interest in the subject again, and I reread the article for the first time in years. Then I asked myself: How much truth was captured 20 years ago? Or was there any truth in the article at all?
Now I must point out, if you are going to get the most from what I am going to say, I suggest you read the original article (SPE 18103, available in SPE's online eLibrary), especially if you are passionate about your engineering career, the way your company practices engineering, and whether the engineering paradigm of the 1980s is still the norm or has morphed into something else. The importance of the distinction of what the current engineering paradigm is or is not relates to how we, as a practicing community of engineers and scientists, meet the challenges of the future to find and produce oil and gas for the world.

A Common Goal
Whether you are a petroleum, mechanical, chemical, electrical, civil, or industrial engineer, or a physicist or chemist, once you enter the world of oil and gas exploration and production, you have a common goal: Find and produce oil and gas in the most cost-effective, safe, and prudent way. This is a yearly multibillion-dollar venture with thousands of professionals worldwide.
If you boil down the three critical factors for civilization through time, humans have been concerned about food, water, and energy. In the last hundred years, few wars were fought over food and water. However, in the last hundred years, it seems a lot of wars have had a heavy energy influence. If you have read The Prize by Daniel Yergin, you will get the flavor of this.
The Digital Petroleum Engineer: Carpe diem!
Authors: Mahdavi Mehrzad 
Published: February 2015

Guest editorial
The digital age has dawned. When it comes to information technology (IT), many think the oil and gas industry has been slow to seize the day. But the truth is we embraced IT early on, beginning in the 1950s with reservoir simulation. Since then we have researched, developed, and deployed many additional technologies and applications, with most recent efforts toward full realization of the digital oilfield.
Although we have made progress, our industry is at a crucial juncture and needs more than incremental steps; we need a major transformation. It is time to take a deep breath and take the plunge into total emersion, to be like fish in water.
Computing technology is no longer the question; it is here and progressing faster than you can say "real-time data transmission and communication." Now we need people with the right skills and vision to use the technology to transform our work. We need digital petroleum engineers.
This editorial defines a digital petroleum engineer in the energy industry, describes some roles for the digital petroleum engineer, explains why such a profession is necessary, and lays out the challenge for industry, academia, and SPE for making the profession a reality—now.
As the Chairperson of the SPE Information Technology Technical Section (ITTS), I have the honor of authoring this editorial. However, the ideas are based on many discussions over the years with many esteemed colleagues, especially those quoted below who are either members of the ITTS or advisers to the group. They have contributed significantly to the discussion and this editorial.
Who is a Digital Petroleum Engineer?
In the early days of industry software development, oil and gas professionals were teamed with IT professionals. While we have had some success with this approach, our industry also has a reputation for slow technology uptake.
IT is an integrative technology, so it only makes sense to take advantage of this catalyst and develop new roles around it. Because we can link systems from the different disciplines, the technology itself helps to transform the work processes and break down the traditional silos that emerged when, before IT, we had to break down complex problems into their smaller component pieces to solve them. Now IT is allowing us to integrate those smaller pieces together so that we can analyze, optimize, and resolve the whole.
At the very basic level a digital petroleum engineer combines IT knowledge with oil and gas content. Of course, we have many people in the industry now who have both of these skill sets. But the bottom line is we need more—many more—and we need them now. We also need to clearly define the skills required to be a digital petroleum engineer, how a person can acquire those skills, the roles they can play in the industry, and a clear career path and opportunities.