About Gas and Oil Expo

Gas and Oil Expo is a reading site about the oil and gas industry. We explain how the equipment works, what the people on a lease, in a plant or in a control room are actually doing, and why the industry runs the way it does. The reports are written for people who work in or around oil and gas, for students and career changers, and for anyone who has driven past a pumpjack or a compressor station and wondered what it was for.

The site is laid out like a show floor. Each subject has its own hall, from drilling and completions in Hall A to the plain-language basics in Hall G, and the guides cover the shows and conferences where the industry meets.

The halls

• Hall A, Drilling & Completions: rigs, drilling fluids, directional wells, casing and cement, fracturing and the work that brings a well on production.
• Hall B, Heavy Oil & Oil Sands: bitumen, SAGD and other in situ methods, mining, upgrading and reclamation.
• Hall C, Natural Gas & LNG: gas processing, compression, storage, liquefaction and shipping.
• Hall D, Pipelines & Midstream: construction, integrity, pigging, control rooms and terminals.
• Hall E, Health, Safety & Environment: gas hazards, protective equipment, methane, flaring, spills and decommissioning.
• Hall F, Careers & Training: entry routes, safety tickets, rotations, courses, conferences and trade shows.
• Hall G, Industry Explained: refining, crude grades, offshore platforms, history and the basics behind the headlines.

Why this name?

The address gasandoilexpo.com used to belong to Gas & Oil Expo, a trade show for the North American oil and gas industry that was held at Stampede Park in Calgary, Alberta, every other year. Its last edition took place in June 2013, and the show did not return. The domain later lapsed.

We kept the name because it describes what we try to do: put the industry's equipment and work in front of the reader, hall by hall, the way a good exhibition floor does. We are a publication: we do not organize, host or sell anything for any expo or conference, so questions about a particular event belong with its organizer.

Who writes here

Five writers share the halls. Lorne Halvorsen covers drilling, completions and heavy oil from Alberta. Ingrid Solheim writes about natural gas, LNG and offshore work. Esteban Villarreal covers pipelines, terminals and refining. Morag Tennant writes about health, safety and environmental practice, and Harriet Dunleavy covers careers, training, conferences and the history of the industry. You can read more about each of them on the writers page.

How we check what we write

Every number, rule and date in a report is checked against a primary source before it goes up: regulators such as the Alberta Energy Regulator, the Canada Energy Regulator, PHMSA, the EPA and OSHA, statistical agencies such as the US Energy Information Administration, and standards bodies and technical societies. Where a report states a rule, it usually links the page we checked. When a figure is only there to show how a calculation works, the report says so.

We do not give investment, trading or price advice, and we do not forecast prices. Safety reports are general education: they never replace a site's own procedures, permits, training or the qualified people on the job.

Paid links

Some pages carry a clearly labelled box for a book shop or a course provider we work with through an affiliate network. If you buy or enrol through one of those boxes, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Partners do not see our reports before they go up and have no say in what we write. Our privacy policy explains the cookies such links can set.

Corrections and ideas

If you find a mistake, a rule that has changed or a topic we should cover, write to us through the contact page or at pressroom@gasandoilexpo.com.