Over the past 3 years I had the great pleasure to serve as the executive editor for peer-reviewed papers in Oil and Gas Facilities (OGF). In that capacity I led a team of dedicated editors reviewing papers that were submitted by the authors for consideration. It is impossible to thank all editors by name, but I want to express my appreciation for all the hours they spent reading and commenting on papers, and as I remarked several times in my opening editorial for that section of the publication, together—authors and editors—we created a product that provided valuable information to the readers.
Unfortunately, peer-reviewed papers will no longer be published in OGF, so my role as executive editor has come to an end, and as my final act in that capacity I would like to thank my associate editors, Galen Dino, Williams Chirinos, and Sudhakar Mahajanam, for all their efforts in the past 3 years. And a special word of thanks should go to Stacie Hughes, SPE’s peer review administrator, technical publications, who made sure that all of us stayed on the right track.
Fortunately, SPE asked me to continue in a new role as the selection editor, which still requires me to read papers, and this time not just those that were submitted for peer review, but all those that deal with oil and gas facilities and have been presented at an SPE event. I will pick three papers each month that are then synopsized by SPE editorial staff in this new section of the online OGF.
As I look back on those years I realize that this role forced me to read technical papers that I otherwise may have ignored, simply because the subject matter was not something that piqued my interest. But reading these papers exposed me to a wide range of technical topics and gave me a much better understanding of many issues we have to deal with in our industry. For that very reason, I strongly recommend to read random SPE papers on a regular basis. True, not every paper is a good paper (and yes, we did decline some as part of the peer-review process), but most papers contain something that is worth considering, either directly or indirectly, in our daily work. I do recognize that reading papers takes time and that there are so many other things that demand our attention, which could easily make us stop doing that.
In this first selection are papers dealing with scaling and corrosion, topics that affect all of us involved with oil and gas facilities. Early in my career I spent about a year as a corrosion engineer to learn the fundamentals, only to discover that without keeping scaling and corrosion in mind, it is impossible to a be a good facilities engineer. Last year, papers on this topic were presented at many SPE events. Selected for this month are a paper on the use of preservation chemicals for extended shut-ins following hydrotesting presented in May 2016 at the Offshore Technology Conference in the US; a paper about scale inhibitor analysis presented last May at the International Oilfield Scaling Conference in Aberdeen; and a paper on pitting presented last November during the International Petroleum Technology Conference.
This Month's Technical Paper Synopses
Oilfield-Corrosion-Failure Analysis: Lessons Learned From Pitting Morphologies
Use of Preservation Chemicals Following Hydrostatic Testing of Pipelines
The Importance of Inhibitor Analysis in Scale Management—An Overview
Please take the time to read the synopses and maybe even the papers themselves that can be found in OnePetro. And while you are there, you never know what other interesting papers you may find, whether on scaling and corrosion or something else.
Gerald Verbeek, Selection Editor
Verbeek Management Services
