President’s Column: A Year in Review

_ For my Journal of Petroleum Technology (JPT) columns this year, I decided to deviate from the traditional format, which generally focuses on relatively short and specific topics. I opted to publish longer, and perhaps somewhat exhaustive, articles on key SPE topics where my objective was to provide members who could (and would) invest their time with an understanding of these issues at a level equivalent to what a board member might know. I promised you candor and transparency, and whether you like it or not, I have done my best to deliver. For some topics, I also released a video, continuing the quite clever approach initiated by 2024 SPE President Terry Palisch, who last year delivered audio podcasts in conjunction with his monthly columns. In my case, I believe that presenting “vodcasts” (videos) worked to some extent. However, videos do not bring as much to exhaustive articles with graphs and relatively complex discussions requiring the reader to digest the information at their own pace. Based on this year’s experience, the video format is more useful for shorter, more specific topics. My five topical columns focused on: (1) SPE’s Role in Energy Transition (2) SPE Finances (3) SPE Governance (4) Quality and Impact of SPE Publications (5) SPE Membership I took a pause preparing these columns when I ran out of topics I wanted to present to you, the members. Well, now there is another topic, one that I am sure will polarize traditionalists and progressives. Still, we need an overdue discussion about our name, the Society of Petroleum Engineers, as a technical society. In candor, I have long wanted to discuss our name, not for the sake of debate, but to define who we are, what we do, and what we may become. In this column, I will start with an update on the five topics of my previous columns. This will be followed by (6) a report on two recent trips in Francophone Africa and Ukraine. The last section (7) of my column will be about our name. You may be tempted to jump straight to section (7) but there is a common thread between these seven items. 1. SPE’s Role in Energy Transition At the end of my October 2024 column, I suggested a classification of SPE’s activity to reflect the extension of our perimeter in the context of energy transition. I shamelessly plagiarized a tagline from a major service company, splitting SPE’s activity into the following segments: - Core: our traditional oil and gas operations - Low Carbon: anything related to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and negative emissions with our work in CCS and CCUS - New Energy: or more precisely, subsurface new energy, which covers all subsurface energy-related activities that are not in our core.