With pleasure, I want to announce our new Midstream Business editorial advisory committee. Our staff will look to them for guidance, insight and feedback as this publication moves toward its goal of serving as the leading publication in the rapidly growing midstream sector of the energy business. The committee members are:

  • Frank Tsuru, president and chief executive, Momentum/M3 Midstream LLC, Houston;
  • Walter “Skip” Simmons, retired consulting engineer, Tomball, Texas;
  • Christopher Breck, managing partner, Heronetta Management LP, New York;
  • John Harpole, president, Mercator Energy LLC, Littleton, Colorado;
  • Debbie J. Conway, regional vice president of sales and marketing, CDM Resource Management and Zephyr Gas Services, Houston;
  • Ben Davis, partner, Energy Spectrum Partners, Dallas;
  • Darrell Bull, general partner, Ohio Valley Midstream, Williams Partners, Wheeling, WestVirginia; and
  • Don Baldridge, president, marketing and logistics business unit, DCP Midstream LLC, Houston.

I’ve had the opportunity to visit with each of these professionals, sometimes at length. They represent multiple disciplines within the midstream sector, and I admit to picking their brains to learn more about what’s happening in the midstream and what they see up ahead. I appreciate their insight very much, and I look forward to working closely with them.

You’ve probably seen their names in past issues and two, John Harpole and Skip Simmons, have been independent but regular contributors to our editorial content. Our mutual goal is to make this magazine better and to assure that it’s well worth the time you, our readers, spend with it.

As I nearly always say in this space, I welcome feedback and story ideas from all of our readers—certainly not our advisory committee alone.

Don’t hesitate to drop me an email, call or stop me if we bump into each other. Several of our readers did just that while I attended the recent Gas Processors Association conference in San Antonio and Hart Energy's DUG Midcontinent conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’m amazed at how good some memories were of past articles.

Speaking of conferences, please keep Hart Energy’s DUG Bakken and Niobrara event in mind, set for May 29-31 in Denver. It features a great agenda on current midstream topics. Associate Editor Michelle Thompson has a great lead story this month on what’s emerging as a play-within-a-play, the Niobrara, that will be a topic of much discussion, I’m sure, in Denver.

We also take a look in this issue at pipeline integrity management and the evolving world of maintenance. Never has it been more important for management to do the right thing from a safety perspective. The stakes have never been higher. Meanwhile, our popular list feature this month spotlights compression providers as they work overtime to meet the growing demand for equipment during the current midstream buildout.

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