A look behind

Dear Reader,

Most of you will not recognize my name or photo on this page, since they last appeared on a World Oil column in March 1999, 29¼ years after they first showed up here, and 41 years after I joined Gulf Publishing Company’s (GPC) World Oil as engineering editor. It is a privilege to contribute to this issue, the 7th and final installment honoring the 100th anniversary of GPC’s founding and World Oil’s ancestral publications. The first time that the name World Oil became predominate on the magazine’s cover was October 1947. Ironically, that year also saw my first exposure to both oilfield work and to the magazine.

Obviously, it’s impossible to compress on one page many of the memorable events of a 41- year tenure with an employer. The following is a very limited attempt.

GPC, as a family-owned company, was a benevolent employer that valued its employees and treated them well beyond what one might expect from a company whose fortunes and misfortunes paralleled the booms and busts of the oil business. Wages were likely not the highest among peers (indeed, for years employees would joke about “working on the plantation”), but perks, caring and at least modest annual raises satisfied most.

Indeed, it was very hard to get fired from GPC. For example, it was nearly 70 years from its founding, spanning The Great Depression, before the company recorded a very modest layoff, necessitated by the oil industry crash of the early-to-mid 1980s. Concurrently, the wages of all other employees were reduced on a prorated basis, based on their pay scale—but with the stipulation that all wages given up by employees would be repaid in full, when the company again became profitable. They were, no doubt, to the profound consternation of Harvard Business School et al, if they heard about it.

World Oil lived up to its name, as its editors traveled to oil-producing and related equipment manufacturing facilities around the world, to bring its readers the latest developments. Countries and city states visited, many multiple times, included Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Sweden, the UK, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, Tunisia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Australia, Brunei, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and Barbados.

Editors also experienced a number of fascinating adventures during their travels. Some brief examples: Traveling through Beirut airport circa 1970, one was nearly arrested by the Lebanese military, which policed the facility due to aircraft hijackings, because his name appeared on an Interpol wanted list. He escaped only because his Texas Drivers License with photo ID confirmed his identity (the bad guy was from Scotland). He never traveled anywhere again without that license. Then, one of our curious (foolish? brave? nutty?) engineering editors became one of the very few folks ever to visit (literally) a subsea completion at a considerable depth below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. His mode of travel was a diving bell lowered from surface that mated with a metal capsule, containing the well’s Christmas tree “in the dry.” He made the round trip A-OK.

And finally, one of our more colorful international editors habitually turned in expense accounts so fascinating that they all got paid. One included a rather exorbitant towing charge for extracting a stuck rental car from an isolated dry wadi that he was enticed into crossing by a small Arab lad, while driving from Libya to Tunisia. The lad summoned his father from behind an adjacent sand dune, and proceeded to hitch his camel to it and pull it out for a mandatory, pre-negotiated tidy sum. At least that was the story we got. Later, he submitted another expense sheet, claiming reimbursement for an expensive pair of cowboy boots and assorted clothing lost when a flash flood inundated his hotel down in Mexico’s Tabasco state. But that’s another yarn too long to detail here.

World Oil, designed specifically to cover technical-operating aspects of the upstream industry, was not the only specialized publication originally published by GPC. Others included Pipe Line Industry for the midstream; Hydrocarbon Processing for downstream and petrochemical operations; Ocean Industry for offshore; Chinese and Russian language versions of the preceding; and catalogs for the upstream, midstream and downstream. World Oil’s Composite Catalog of Oil Field Equipment & Services grew to become the largest source of upstream information in the world, with a record 9,000+ pages, in five volumes, in its 1982–1983 edition. Regrettably, it eventually succumbed to the computer.

A very memorable event in the mid-1990s was an attempted hostile takeover of GPC by a competitor that involved two of the largest, most notable law firms in Houston. At one court hearing before a judge, the takeover crowd had four of its lawyers show up, while GPC had only one. He, of course, protested to the judge about being so unfairly outnumbered. Her retort was, “Don’t worry about that, you can handle them.” He did. The attempt remained an attempt, hopefully costing the aggressor more than the defender.

Today, with the oil industry in the throes of one of its worst busts ever, World Oil and GPC are being tested severely, as well. But with new, confident, locally owned management, a streamlined operation, and the assurance that oil and gas will recover as it always does in spite of itself, bumbling government meddling, enviro-fanatics and the fairy tales of “alternate” energy, there is no reason that this organization won’t be around for many more decades to come.

See you on down the road—hopefully.