Petroleum Reservoirs for Dummies (Oil Biz Week)

Petroleum reservoirs

Considering how vital petroleum is to people – besides gasoline, diesel, and heating oil; crude oil is the base of plastics, makeup, food additives, pharmaceuticals, paint, and a gazillion other products – the average person is pretty much in the dark about where oil comes from. That doesn't stop some of them from sharing their ignorance, however. Take John Crew of InfoBarrel.com¹, who shared his "expertise" in a series of oil patch job descriptions like "Oil Field Jobs: The MWD (Measuring While Drilling)."

John's description of the process of MWD is fairly accurate (probably because it's pretty much a reword of a more authoritative website). We're a little confused about how one could get a job as a "MWD," since that's a process instead of a job title: the MWD operator is (usually) a drilling engineer (contrary to Crew's claim that one can get the job just by being the son-in-law of the "coordinator of the rig," whatever that is). We're not here to parse job titles, though. We're here to correct Crew's totally dumbass description of an oil reservoir:

"...oil forms in layers down in the earth. Picture a layered cake in your oven. The top layer represents topsoil, and each descending layer is a different form of dirt, etc. The bottom layer is the oil."

Clearly, someone who's never heard the layered earth described as crust, mantle and core... Add to that the ridiculously simplistic notion that oil just forms a deep layer of liquid (almost as stupid as Joe Reichart's notion of oil formation). For the thousandth time, people, oil doesn't form a lake, pool, river, stream, or layer down in the earth! Oil doesn't (usually) collect in caves or "pockets." Petroleum, including both oil and natural gas, is found in minuscule pore spaces between grains of rock. A petroleum reservoir is a layer of rock with lots of pore spaces that are connected to each other. It's not a layer – deep layers of fossil fuel are coal, an entirely different kettle of fish. John's dumbassery continues:

"Well, if you stick a straw down the bottom of the cake and suck, you’ll only get a little bit of the layer. The question that has been on the minds of oil company executives is 'How do we get to the rest of the layer?'"

In the context of horizontal drilling (which is what MWD is all about), the notion of sucking on a straw is... just plain stupid. And here at the Antisocial Network, we like to reward people who are just plain stupid with a little prize: the Dumbass of the Day award.

¹ InfoBarrel has deleted all its user-generated content in a failed effort to become relevant, but you can still read Crew's content using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   infobarrel.com/Oil_Field_Jobs_The_MWD_Measuring_While_Drilling

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