Drilling Rig Models for Dummies

land drilling rig

Other than fact that gasoline comes from crude oil, most people seem to know virtually nothing about the oil business.¹ For many of them, the only exposure they've ever had came in the form of news reports about the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill, known to many as "the Deepwater Horizon well." Never mind that it was actually BP's Macondo well, and that the Deepwater Horizon  was the drill ship. For an example of some of the more common ignorance about oil and exploration for the stuff, we direct your attention to Andrew Button and his Sciencing.com post, "School Projects on How to Make an Oil Rig."

Button's ignorance crops up almost immediately; in his first sentence, in fact:

"An oil rig is a mechanized platform that helps oil companies extract the fossil fuel from its source, usually underground or the bottom of the ocean."

Sorry, Andrew, but with the exception of a few seeps, e.g., the La Brea Tar Pits, oil is always found underground. If it's found at "the bottom of the ocean," then there's probably a serious problem (see Deepwater Horizon).

Sadly, Andrew's information doesn't get much better as you read down the page, including such bogosity as,

• "Oil rigs take months, even years (in the case of offshore rigs), to build" – Sorry, Andy, the vast majority of rigs are erected in a matter of days. But, then, most of them are on land...
• "Oil rigs can't be set up anywhere. They have to be set up in oil fields where the physical geography permits extraction." – Bushwa: as long as you can lease the property and get a permit, you can set up a rig anywhere. It sure as heck doesn't have to be in an oil field!
• "A project on the geographic aspects of oil-rig construction could talk about different types of drills needed to penetrate different surfaces..." – First, you putz, drills don't "penetrate different surfaces," they penetrate different sorts of rock. Oh, and there are actually only a couple of different kinds of drills – rotary and cable – and a couple of different driving methods.
• "One project on different platform types uses diagrams to illustrate how engineers make different types of oil rigs for different purposes. " – The different platform types are designed for different water depths and expected wave and current conditions, not "different purposes."

As so often happens when liberal arts types – Button was a polysci student when he wrote this for eHow – try to talk about the oil industry, the ignorance is palpable. In this case, our Dumbass of the Day is simply true to type.

¹ Come to think of it, a substantial number seem unaware that gasoline comes from oil!  😒

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