Comments: JPT's Editorial Committee

Editor's column

SPE’s mission to collect, disseminate, and exchange upstream technical information valuable to the industry and the public is served by its many conferences, workshops, training programs, its website, and its publications. Technical papers delivered at SPE conferences have attained a special place in meeting that goal.

Conference technical papers explain state-of-the-art technologies and their application to upstream developments, share best practices, and present detailed case studies and solutions to problems. When JPT was first published in 1949, it contained long, full-length technical papers. The creation of SPE Journal, SPE’s first publication dedicated to peer-reviewed technical papers, took some of the publishing burden off of JPT, as did the technical journals that followed that covered disciplines such as drilling, reservoir analysis, and production. Eventually, the increasing depth and breadth of industry technical topics, and the number of papers that were being presented at SPE events, exceeded the ability to publish enough of these great papers. Now, SPE conference papers, as well as papers from other associations, are housed in the OnePetro website at www.onepetro.org, and JPT some years back moved to a format of publishing summaries of the best of these technical papers.

As with many of the most important functions of SPE, selecting the best technical papers for publication in JPT would not be possible without the hard work of dedicated volunteers. The JPT Editorial Committee is made up of 47 petroleum professionals— working for service companies, international oil companies, national oil companies, independents, consultancies, and academia—who are specialists in a given area of upstream technology. The committee is currently chaired by Syed Ali, a technical advisor with Schlumberger. The members of the committee are listed in each issue of JPT and can also be found on the SPE website at www.spe.org/jpt/documents/JPT_ Editorial_Committee.pdf.

Members of the committee collectively review every paper prepared for presentation at an SPE conference, the four Offshore Technology Conferences, and the International Petroleum Technology Conference and select the best papers in each of 47 separate technical categories. Those categories cover the wide span of upstream E&P and include topics such as deepwater production, drilling technology, formation evaluation, and subsea operations, among others. Each reviewer selects papers for summarizing in an issue of JPT and also picks additional papers for a recommended reading list. The reviewer also prepares a short article on the state of the technology in that particular discipline. Each issue of JPT includes papers from four of these 47 topics.

This year, the committee reviewed 4,199 papers for possible publication, compared with 3,893 in 2013. Once the papers are selected, JPT staff summarize the fulllength technical paper into 2 to 3 pages in JPT. The full-length paper is available online free to members for 2 months. This benefit is offered to satisfy members who want to read the full-length paper and those who want to see a wide range of technology covered in each issue. Reader surveys show high approval from members of this summary approach, and the technical paper synopses remain one of the most popular features of JPT. JPT