We are about to turn the page on 2025, which makes it a good time to look back at the topics that earned your attention over the past year. Your clicks and feedback have shaped JPT’s coverage and given us plenty to consider as we think about where the industry is headed.
Before we revisit what captured your interest, I want to offer a personal note of gratitude to SPE’s global membership. About 132,000 professionals and students across 146 countries make up one of the world’s strongest and most productive technical communities.
This diverse group represents a global brain trust with a shared mission to transfer the knowledge that helps the world find and produce oil and gas in a safe, efficient, and sustainable way. Thanks to your work, people around the globe can wake up each day, get where they need to go, heat or cool their homes, and support the industries that build the future.
Your openness at SPE conferences and in technical papers also deserves recognition. That willingness to share what you learn allows the industry to move forward at a pace that would not be possible if everyone worked in isolation.
A central part of our mission at JPT is to amplify the progress and innovation that individuals and small teams are achieving inside their companies. When we bring those lessons to the wider community, others can build on them and strengthen their own operations.
We also understand that the industry often takes a “fast-follower” approach, and the reasons for that are sound. The stakes are high in oil and gas. Safety, environmental responsibility, careers, and entire development projects rely on careful decisions and a steady respect for risk. With this in mind, we aim to highlight ideas with genuine potential for broader use and, at the very least, to spark your curiosity.
If we can lower the barriers to trying something new and help nurture a more open mindset, then we are doing our part to support the industry’s progress.
Thanks to your willingness to share bright ideas, we were able to produce the articles below. These features rank among the most-read stories of the year so far.
- Curiosity Meets Comprehension: How Energy LLM Is Bridging Knowledge Gaps
- From Coke to Crude: ExxonMobil Pumping Refinery-Sourced Proppant in Hundreds of Permian Basin Wells
- The Shape of Water: How Devon Energy Solved for Fracture Geometry Across Several Major Shale Plays
- Firm Says Microbes Strike Hydrogen Gold in California Oil Field
- How Brava Energia Turned Brazil’s Atlanta Deepwater Heavy-Oil Field Into a Full-Scale FPSO Development
- A New Texas Two-Step: Why One Eagle Ford Producer Is Using Hydrocarbons for Well Stimulation and EOR
- Vaca Muerta Shale Drives Argentina’s LNG Export Ambitions
- Oilfield Intelligence: Generative AI Applications Deliver Real-World Value
- US Shale Sector Embraces Rise of the ‘G-Fleet’
- Next-Gen Fracturing: How Repsol and ExxonMobil Are Using Data, Iteration To Optimize Well Performance
- Reviving Wells and Uncovering Reserves in Brownfields
- Is There a Hydraulic Fracturing Blind Spot in Conventional Reservoirs?
- Immersive Experience: VR Revolutionizing Oil Workflows
- What You Need To Know About Automation vs. Autonomy, and the Future of Drilling Tech
- Why Always-Available Underwater Drones Could Transform Subsea Operations
We hope that if you missed some of these articles, you take a moment to read one or two before the new year arrives. This is also a good time to mention that SPE membership renewal is open if you have not already taken care of it.
Your membership offers you many benefits, including full access to JPT features and the 12 synopses of recently presented technical paper that we publish each month. Keep in mind that each paper we summarize is not only hand-picked by the experts from our JPT Editorial Review Board, but they are also available for members to download for free for a 60-day period. Taken together, these benefits give you exclusive access to about 150 in-depth industry reports and papers each year.
On behalf of the entire SPE publications team, we wish you a happy holiday season and a very happy New Year.
