It’s customary when a magazine editor retires to gnaw on the details of the past 20 years and spit them out as an autobiography with little relevance to the remaining members of mankind.

This time around, we’ll try to break that mold and talk about an education in the most fascinating business in the world and events, technologies and people that have touched all of our lives.

Lesson: This business is personal. Some of the finest personal and professional people in the world work in the upstream oil and gas business.

Conducting interviews gives a person some insight into the people on the other end of the questions. Invariably, when I was smart enough to ask the dumb questions that showed ignorance and interest about a topic or technology, you took the time to set me straight. Without exception, you’re proud of the work you do, and you take pains to make sure people who don’t understand the business get clear explanations. It makes a difference.

The spirit of Tom Slick still lives. Tom Slick was the oilman who made a multi-million-dollar oil and gas deal on the back of an envelope in the lobby of the Tulsa Hotel with T.N. Barnsdall.

People make solid agreements; not lawyers or paper contracts. We’ve all met dozens of people in this industry who consider their word an iron-clad contract. You can see them every day, heading up operating companies and service organizations and taking leadership positions in oil and gas associations around the world. A few of them even head up industry publications.

Lesson: This business is cyclical. Prices rise and fall. Booms and busts are normal.

My first lesson in oilfield education began after the Arab oil embargo in 1973, when, as a business news reporter with the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, I was sure that Colorado’s one trillion bbl of recoverable shale oil was going to save the country and put the state on international maps. Exxon, Tosco and Unocal were the stars as all the major operators and many independents pulled out all the stops to mine shale in the caprock cliffs of Colorado’s Piceance Basin or use explosives to rubblize the shale in the ground and cook out the oil. The whole boom lasted some 12 years and produced about 5 million bbl of oil, less than the United States imports in a day.

The bottom dropped out as world oil supplies increased and international oil prices fell leaving Parachute a ghost town until entrepreneurs turned it into a retirement community. The Unocal plant up the canyon back of Parachute now produces nahcolite for The Williams Cos.

Now, oil shale is back as Shell and others try to find a way to produce it economically.

People talked about US $100/bbl oil, but it never happened until this year. The United States had plenty of gas 20 years ago; too much gas. Few operators even looked for it.

We’ve seen it over and over, from the international, political level to local boom and bust plays like the Austin Chalk in Texas where first fracturing then horizontal wells gave the play new life again and again.

The big plays stick around. Canada’s heavy oil sands went through a series of near disasters before it became one of the hottest plays on the planet.

Some of the big swings in the industry have been politically driven, from oil embargoes to the non-OPEC production increases that followed.

The current upswing seems driven by a more powerful, less whimsical and more permanent factor, accelerating demand.

Massive recruiting programs accompanied each upswing in a cycle followed just as surely with massive layoffs as the cycle plunged on economists’ charts. That hasn’t changed, and it’s not likely to change.

Lesson: This business is a composite of technological marvels. As my boss, Bill Pike, is fond of saying, with the latest oil and gas technology you can bury a tire 5,000 ft (1,525 m) underground and 5 miles (8 km) away, find the tire and drive a drill string through the middle.

People complain the oil industry is slow to pick up on new technology, and from a short-term view, they’re right. Few operations managers will trust the success of a multi-million-dollar well, and possibly their jobs, to the claims offered for a service company’s newest and greatest gizmo, but engineers in those companies will watch with interest as others try it and find it works.

On joining Hart Publications in 1988, in charge of Western Oil World magazine, I saw Amoco start to drill horizontal wells with mechanical steering equipment in Caldwell County, Texas. If it wanted to turn the well, it had to pull the string, attach a bent sub and go back in — no MWD, LWD, PWD or even UBD or MPD. Keeping the drill string in the Austin Chalk was largely a matter of luck. Burlington Resources — then Meridian — followed up with horizontal wells looking for oil in fractured Bakken shale in North Dakota.

Now, Shell in Brunei uses real-time drilling to drill horizontal zigzag snake wells and vertical zigzag dragon wells to intersect multiple small reservoirs with a single well bore at its Champion West field. CDX Gas uses pinnate wells — laterals drilled off laterals like the veins on leaves — to tap coalbed methane gas in the Appalachian Basin.

Drilling with casing? Whoever heard of such a thing?

Expandable casing and screens weren’t on the drawing board yet. Sand screens were around, but they weren’t nearly as efficient as modern gravel packs in preventing sand incursion.

During the 1980s, seismic companies had spent a staggering $750,000 on 2-D seismic surveys in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, a small 3-D survey costs a lot more, but it has proved its value in finding oil and gas and in doing a much better job of avoiding dry holes. Pre-stack depth migration, AVO and shear-wave analysis were virtually untouched.

Magnetic and gravity surveys had been around for a long time, but electromagnetic seabed logging wasn’t yet in the toolbox.

Technological concepts only on the drawing boards then are commonplace now. No one used micro-seismic measurements to gauge the effectiveness of frac jobs in real time, and if anyone thought of simultaneously fracturing two wells with a single job or conducting staged fracs in a single drill string trip, they weren’t talking about them.

The only smart wells were the successful ones, and about the only action an operator could take about water incursion was pull the tubing, go into the well and set a plug above the water zone then pump more oil until the water level rose again. No swellable packers were available to do the job automatically.

Coalbed methane production from wells in the Black Warrior and San Juan basins of Alabama and New Mexico started only in the mid-1980s but it still wasn’t profitable without federal tax credits. Now, it’s a worldwide resource.

Those tax credits also lent a jump start to shale gas development in the Appalachian Basin, the Antrim play in Michigan and the Barnett Shale play in north Texas. In 1988, the fracturing techniques still were in the experimental stages.

Nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, borrowed from the medical field, was getting a slow and uncertain start as the early tools succumbed to hostile downhole conditions and their own snail-like operations.

The deepest-water production in 1988 came from Conoco and Texaco’s Jolliet TLP in 1,500 ft (457.5 m) of water.

The deepest-water well was Shell’s Coulomb in 7,520 ft (2,293 m) of water in the Gulf of Mexico, drilled in 1988 but not produced until the late stages of the Na Kika project. When the two wells in the field were completed in 2004, they were the deepest-water subsea completions in the world.

Twenty years ago, the offshore Western Australia play was only five years old since the discovery of Harriet field in 1983. Offshore West Africa was just getting started.

Now a person can tick off an amazing list of names in every continent of spectacular technological operations working now and planned for the future. Look at Bayu-Undan and Greater Gorgon off Australia; Tengiz, Kashagan, Shah Deniz and Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan; the Sakhalin projects and Shtokman offshore Russia; Ormen Lange and Snohvit in the Norwegian and Barents seas; Roncador, the Marlim fields and the newly discovered Tupi trend off Brazil; Girassol and the Greater Plutonio project off West Africa, and Na Kika, Independence Hub, thePerdido project and Thunder Horse in the Gulf of Mexico. Those are just a small handful of dazzling technological achievements that will deliver oil and gas to consumers around the world.

Lesson: If you feel you’re accomplishing positive work and you enjoy doing it, don’t stop.

If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t change a thing. I’ve gotten an education from the oilpatch, and I’ve had a great time doing it, thanks to all of you. I intend to continue that education and continue the fun working on special projects for the Hart family of publications.

I believe in peak oil production, but I don’t believe we will see it anytime soon; probably not in my lifetime. I still have plenty of work to do, and so do you.

Don Lyle, executive editor of E&P magazine, is retiring after 20 years with Hart Energy Publishing and its predecessor companies. He leaves with the best wishes and heartfelt thanks of the entire Hart family.