Oil and Gas, the Dummies Version

Drilling rig on site

Today’s example of a woefully unqualified boob expounding on something about which he (or perhaps it’s a she?) knows squat comes from another paragon of quality, HubPages.com. The Dumbass of the Day goes by the pen name jmccas1, posting his/her thoughts on the topic of “Unconventional Resources.”¹ With luck, J didn't make any money off this one, though in all probability s/he made more than we'll make by correcting him. Ah, well, such is life.

J, as we’ll call him, expounded on what we in the oil and gas industry² call unconventional resources. After starting off with a mishmash of sentences seemingly jammed together without regard to punctuation, he then schools his readers on the process of producing natural gas from a well-known unconventional natural gas play, the Barnett Shale of north Texas. That's the gas play responsible for huge drilling activity in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The citizens of the nearby city of Denton recently raised the blood pressure of newly-elected Texas governor Greg Abbott by passing a drilling ban in their city (I guess the state level is local enough for him). But enough about that.

In describing the process of producing natural gas from the Barnett, J writes:

First a series of wells are drilled horizontally through the shale bed to maximize wellbore exposure. Then fractures are administered through the wellbore casing and the surrounding reservoir rock. These fractures enable the flow of gas into the wellbore. Finally, production is maximized through the use of enhanced oil recovery techniques where heated fluids, typically steam, are injected into the reservoir to pressurize the natural gas forcing it into the well bore.

Duh: J conflates two entirely different processes here:

Drilling a horizontal well followed by hydraulic fracturing (aka “fracking”) has revolutionized the oil and gas industry, producing both natural gas and liquid hydrocarbons from shale reservoirs in many parts of the world: you may recognize names like Marcellus, Niobrara, Barnett, Eagleford, Bakken... Using steam in enhanced recovery is a practice called "Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage" (SAG-D), a common technique in the tar sands of western Canada and Venezuela and the heavy oil reservoirs of southern California. Steam, however, is not used to recover natural gas anywhere, including the Barnett Shale. It simply wouldn’t work.

If you don’t believe us, believe the experts cited by the Houston Chronicle’s FuelFix blog. Dumbass of the Day, indeed.

¹ The post has been deleted, but you can still see it using archive.org's Wayback machine. Its URL was   jmccas1.hubpages.com/hub/Unconventional-Resources
² Hint: that's the industry our chief scientist worked in for more than thirty years...

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