Fracking for the Utter Dummy

Horizontal drilling schematic

One of the most ironic – in the real, non-hip sense of the word – things about good old eHow.com (more recently being parceled into niche sites under the moniker "Leaf Group") is that content writers are forbidden to cite existing eHow content as sources for their "work." Isn't that a kick? Then again, perhaps the site's managers are aware of just how useless a good portion of the older articles are, especially if they were written by dumbasses like Jorina Fontelera. Take for example Jorina's tasty little article entitled "How Does Horizontal Oil Drilling Work?"¹

Jorina's graced these pages before, most recently for performing a crappy imitation of Reader's Digest. This time, however, she not only did a lousy job of condensing information, she just plain got it wrong. Take, for instance, this bit of dumbassery:

"Once the drilling commences, the miners set up large frac tanks and trucks with high pressure pumps to bring the oil to the surface. Multiple pumping units are used and the gallons of oil pumped up to the surface are stored in the frac tanks."

Whoa, Nellie: now that's just plain stupidly wrong, and in so many ways! Who on Earth calls the the process of drilling for oil "mining"? No, dumbass, fracking takes place after drilling has been completed! Frack trucks do not pump oil to the surface, they pump fracking fluid into the well! "....gallons of oil"? Moron! "...stored in the frac [sic] tanks"? No, dumbass, the tanks hold water and chemicals for the frack job, not produced oil.

Never mind for now the fact that fracking isn't technically part of the horizontal drilling process Jorina (sort of) described. It was connected in her tiny little mind, so... More to the point, however, anyone who has even a passing familiarity with horizontal drilling would get a real "kick" out of Ms Fontelera's version of the process – at least until realizing just how much of the information contained in this article is... Just. Plain. Wrong. And that's why Jorina's our Dumbass of the Day!

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. The URL was  ehow.com/how-does_5074948_horizontal-oil-drilling-work.html

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SI - FRACKING