Natural Gas for Dummies

A drilling rig on site

For the 100th edition of the Freelance File, the Antisocial Network falls back on two perennial favorites: the oil and gas industry and the target-rich mass of dumbasses over at eHow.com. Today's awardee is David Barber, yet another "journalist" freelancing far, far outside his area of expertise. His topic this time? "The Life of the Average Natural Gas Well"¹ at, of course, eHow.com

Now a normal person might assume that some internet dummy wanted to know how long an "average" natural gas well produces. The real answer is "it depends": it depends on a lot of things. After some pussyfoooting around in pseudoscience and a mishmash of misinformation, Barber (finally) got to the statement, "...some gas wells can remain in operation for up to 50 years." How he got there though was, at least to our staff petroleum geologist, a matter of true hilarity. Some of Barber's dumbassery:

• "Natural gas has been 'mined' and used... since the 1880s."  What is it with you yutzes at eHow and this "mining" of oil and gas bull? What's wrong with "producing"?

• "According to 'Oil and Gas Journal,' it has been only recently that drilling has taken place specifically targeting natural gas, primarily in Texas, Oklahoma and the mountains west. Natural gas exploration has taken place "Only recently"? Odd: we remember it from the '70s and '80s and long before... And maybe you missed the whole Marcellus Shale natural gas boom in Pennsylvania and New York - not "Texas, Oklahoma and the mountains west." Dumbass.

• "Anticlinal slopes are areas where the earth has folded up on itself, forming the dome shape that is characteristic of natural gas reservoirs..." You mean anticlines, not "anticlinal slopes" and traps, not "reservoirs." Dumbass.

"Some areas... have densely packed sand and rock formations, which release these gas deposits more slowly..." Dumbass: that's not "densely packed sand and rock formations," it's shale! "...many wells that have produced natural gas for years are becoming depleted..." Perhaps if you'd done some research you might have discovered what "depleted" means and wouldn't have made such a dumbass statement. "...gas producers are choking back production from wells as a way of boosting the overall efficiency and life span of their gas wells..." Dumbass: the article you cited clearly explains that producers were slowing production as a means of leveling out their income in a volatile natural gas market. Maybe if you'd actually read the article...

Considering how vital oil and gas production are to the average citizen, it never ceases to amaze us just how much of a dumbass people like David Barber prove themselves to be on the topic. 

¹ The post has been deleted, and archive.org's Wayback machine never made a copy of the post. Oh, well, no loss...

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