Drilling Rigs for the Dummy

Drilling rig on land

In case you haven't noticed, the average American thinks he's an expert on the oil business. After all, most of us buy stuff from oil companies a couple of times a week, right? The reality is that the vast majority of the self-appointed experts know next to nothing about anything that happened before they stuck the pump nozzle in their filler pipes... and people like eHow.com's Tonya Yirka are partially to blame. That's because they publish rubbish like "Types of Oil Drilling Rigs" at places like Sciencing.com. Well, in reality, it's Leaf Group's fault just as much...

Yirka, a former teacher (according to her bio) appears to have been fixated on offshore drilling. Apparently, lots of people were fixated on offshore drilling when Tonya originally published this at eHow back in 2010 – wonder why? (Hint: google "Deepwater Horizon"). The fact that about 70% of the world's drilling takes place on land notwithstanding, Tonya went straight to the water.

According to Yirka's somewhat fractured definitions, there are five types of rigs:

• Jackups; which Tonya claims "have bottom supports." Of course, so do fixed platforms...
• Floaters; which most people in the industry call "semi-submersibles"...
• Fixed Platforms; which Yirka says are "[more] permanent offshore immobile steel or cement structures" – we suspect they're steel and cement (among other things).
• Complaint [sic] Towers; which are actually "compliant" towers, so-called because their flexible mooring legs allow lateral movement due to wave, tide, and current motion.
• Drillships; which Tonya thinks are "usually built on tanker hulls," a ridiculous claim. She also thinks that "[dynamic] positioning systems keep the ship over the well," a rather juvenile claim: the system keeps the ship located over the seafloor assembly, even before there is a well.

She missed drilling barges, by the way, ships that are used in very shallow water like the Mississippi delta.
Of course, if Tonya were to drive across west Texas (or, for that matter, southeastern Illinois), she might notice that drilling also takes place on land. None of those five types is of much use to the mom-and-pop shops operating in the Illinois Basin. Instead, steel-construction rigs arrive on trucks and are assembled in place with a crane. There are even truck-mounted rigs for shallow holes. Drilling on land accounts for 70% of drilling work!

Because Tonya didn't know, or didn't stop to think about land exploration, she omitted the rigs that account for ⅔ of all drilling. Passing one's personal ignorance along to one's readers is among the chief criteria for selection as the Antisocial Network's Dumbass of the Day. Yirka failed this test with flying colors!

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