A likely little-known fact: Your downstream editor was designated by his high-school graduating classmates as most likely to become the next T.S. Eliot. The prediction was a reasonable one, even if still yet to be realized.
A poet in college, this editor, like Eliot, was also once a schoolteacher, and where Eliot for a time worked in banking to earn his wages, this editor began covering the oil and gas business.
All these years later, this editor cannot help but think that his classmate’s foretelling arose from his then- and still-immersion in the primal energies given us in ancient myths that continue reforming and reshaping themselves to remain important touchstones.
Backwards, forward
There’s no question we’re living in strange times, but it’s perhaps even more strange for those working in the oil and gas industry. The priorities and objectives dominating our utmost attention merely a year ago are quickly becoming relics of a past now shelved.
This dynamic makes accurately chronicling the progress and advances of an industry as essential as petroleum complicated. And it’s likely to get even more so.
On Mar. 12, 2025, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a record 24 news releases announcing “31 historic actions in the greatest and most consequential day of degregulation in US history” as part of the agency’s plan to help “Power the Great American Comeback.”
“While accomplishing EPA’s core mission of protecting the environment,” EPA said the actions are designed “to unleash American energy, lower cost of living for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, restore the rule of law, and give power back to states to make their own decisions.”
Prima facie, the deregulatory rationale sounds like the industry’s greatest dream on track to becoming true. Many of the proposed actions specifically aim to benefit the industry, including revision of wastewater regulations for oil and gas extraction, termination of the electric vehicle mandate, reconsideration and rollbacks of various air emissions and monitoring regulations, and even termination of EPA’s environmental justice arm.
While this greatest dream certainly seems now within reach, the objective observer cannot help but point out that its degree of greatness all very much depends on who is having the dream.
Into the mystic
While there are days this editor wishes nothing more to live in the prima facie space, his conscience dictates a life lived, as Eliot puts it, “at the still point of the turning world,” that liminal space betwixt and between, having a foot in both worlds but native to neither.
The curse and advantage of residing in this in-between space is an ability to see both worlds clearly. This editor is all for lowering costs of living for US families, spurring US energy innovation, and increasing the number of domestic jobs. The hard part is dealing with the apparent belief that all of this must be accomplished—as EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin puts it—by “driving a dagger straight into the heart” of anything that runs counter to doing so.
Eliot was never more right than when he observed, “human kind / cannot bear very much reality.” To see it can oftentimes make one want to turn away. But the turning away isn’t an option for some of us.
And be thankful for that. It’s those of us living in the liminal who are best equipped to carry the ever-unfolding tension of opposites. At worst, we illuminate that which you prefer not to see. At best, we guarantee you objectivity; not sometimes, but always.
Robert Brelsford | Downstream Editor
Robert Brelsford joined Oil & Gas Journal in October 2013 as downstream technology editor after 8 years as a crude oil price and news reporter on spot crude transactions at the US Gulf Coast, West Coast, Canadian, and Latin American markets. He holds a BA (2000) in English from Rice University and an MS (2003) in education and social policy from Northwestern University.
