Oil Wells for Dummies

Open hole completion

Considering how dependent so much of the industrialized world is on petroleum, it's astounding just how stupid so many people are about the basics of the industry that produces that petroleum. Maybe that's why we prop up the Antisocial Network's staff petroleum geologist in front of his keyboard once every few weeks to lambaste some idiot freelancer trying to answer the question "How Does an Oil Well Work?"¹ This time, we feature Edwin Thomas of Sciencing.com.

Edwin's ignorance of the topic of oil wells was pretty obvious to our geologist, but the sad part of this (and many eHow.com articles) is that it's polished enough to appear authoritative. Unfortunately, it isn't. The following are samples of the many errors Thomas made in rewording an unknown source.

• Drilling: "A drilling rig bores a hole down through the dirt and rock to the oil reservoir. This hole is usually between 5 and 36 inches wide." – A) what's this obsession eHowians have with dirt? and B) Vanishingly few boreholes are 36 inches in diameter, and the ones that are are usually an air shaft for a mine.
• Drilling: "...'mud'... can be just water, water with air bubbles, or water with polymers." – Most often, it's actual mud: water mixed with clay. Idiot.

• Completion: "The simplest approach, called 'barefoot,' is to not do anything. In the open hole approach, a liner is made with many small holes..." – Ed, you idiot, barefoot and openhole completions are the same thing!
• Completion: "Sometimes concrete is poured into the space between the pipe and the borehole to achieve this stability." – No, you stupid ass, concrete is always pumped into the space between the casing and wall of the borehole!
• Production: "...a 'workover' of the old well, [is] either replacing or widening the old well, or drilling a new well into the same reservoir." – No, idiot, a workover usually consists of repairs to the well. It never means "drilling a new well"!

How any one person can provide so much erroneous information in so few words is beyond us. The ignorance of this blithering idiot, however, is one of the reasons our petroleum geologist only comes out every couple of weeks to anoint yet another Dumbass of the Day. Sadly, he could probably do so every day...

¹ The original has been sent to the rewrite team by Leaf Group (we'll get back to the new version later), but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/about_4925679_oil-well-work.html

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