Reservoir Rocks for Dummy Geologists

Reservoir, trap, and seal

Only a few days ago (day before yesterday, in fact) we were convinced that we'd located the probable winner of the Dumbass of the Year award. Well, all bets are off: today's nominee has just as good a chance as the stupidity that Dan Boone published about metamorphism. This potential honoree comes to us courtesy of the staff petroleum geologist, who found M. McGee¹ misinforming the world about "What is a Reservoir Rock" through a website that thinks it deserves the name WiseGEEK.com. You're not so "wise" in this case, folks!

Profitable Oil Drilling for Business Dummies

Bet these guys know more about drilling than Ashbee!

If we had an experimental physicist on staff here at the Antisocial Network there might be a few posts here making fun of J-school grads and people with English lit degrees trying to explain charmed quarks and the significance of the Higgs boson. We don't have one, but we do have a petroleum geologist. That's why we regularly take idiots to task for misinformation about geology, maps, and the oil  business; people like Ashbee A. Bakht, who posted "Profitable Oil Drilling Simplified" at another paragon of factuality, EzineArticles.com.

Same Old Oil Misinformation, Different Dummy

Parts of a drilling rig

It's been quite a while since our staffers 1) skewered some idiot from HubPages.com and 2) raked some fool over the coals for misinformation about the oil business. Today, we're gonna rectify that long silence: the victim of the day is some character who publishes his "hubs" under the handle tjar12, but a little googling finds he's a guy by the name of Tim Archbold. We have no idea why he thinks he's knowledgeable about "Oil Exploration and Drilling - How is Oil Found?"; but the sad fact is that he isn't...

Drill, Baby, Drill! the Dummy Version

A drilling rig

There seem to be few topics about which the average American is more ill-informed than how "exploration for gasoline" works; among them are string theory, neurosurgery, and rocket science. We suspect that, if our staff petroleum geologist could survive the inevitable migraines, we could mine the internet for misinformation about the oil industry for months (there are, admittedly, some places that seem to get it right). We've had today's candidate on the back burner for a while, mainly because the author is anonymous. We understand, we wouldn't want to admit we're that stupid, either; but here's what the eHow Careers and Work Editor had to tell us about "How to Strike Oil."¹ Strike oil, indeed...

When an eHow.com post starts out with inane garbage like

Fossil Fuels for the Total Dummy

Crude oil

In the last decade, the money-hungry freelancers filled the internet with the kind of rubbish that has frustrated middle-school teachers since... well, since the first middle-school teachers. We're talking half-assed answers here, and bull based on incomplete, shallow research. You know, the kind of answer that just skims the surface without actually bothering with facts, right? You don't know? Well, the researchers here at the Antisocial Network have turned up a striking example of this kind of "knowledge"; if one can dignify the answer with that word. The content was perpetrated upon the 'net at, no surprise here, eHow.com; and it was posted by contributor Robert Balun in response to the question "Why Are Fossil Fuels Non-Renewable?"¹

Rock Types for Dummies

Schematic of the rock cycle

Some people just don't know when to quit, do they? Well, we suppose that in their defense, sometimes they're not allowed to quit when they should. We're not talking about Peyton Manning here, we're talking about eHow contributors under the lash of that site's minimum word count rule. That's why some of the articles on the site say so many stupid things: trying to pad the content out to meet the minimum. Today's example is repeater Elyse James, with her Journalism BA, trying (and failing) to answer a question that should have taken fewer than ten words. The question? "In What Type of Rocks Are Fossil Fuels Found?"¹ (now hiding at niche site OurPastimes.com for unknown reasons). Elyse's word count? About three hundred... a lot of them wrong.

Oil Exploration for Dummies

Jim's apparently never heard of "maps"...

Although at $50 per barrel crude oil isn't a particularly hot commodity these days, the Beverly Hillbillies model for instant wealth remains part of the American Dream. Though Jed Clampett supposedly struck oil when he missed a rabbit with his long gun, finding oil on one's property really isn't all that simple. That's why people ask questions like "How to Find Out If Your Land Has Oil," though if they're expecting eHow.com's Jim Franklin and his Sciencing.com answer to be of any help at all, they're sadly mistaken...

Jim found himself an elementary-school description of oil wildcatting and (as is usual at eHow) simply reworded it. In the process, though, he had some rather interesting things to say:

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:

How Oil Forms for Dummies (Oil Biz Week)

Future oil? Naaah...

If there's one single misconception about petroleum that endures among the dumbass class, it's the notion that oil comes from dinosaurs (that, and "underground lakes/rivers of oil," but we'll get to that one tomorrow). Over at eHow, somehow they managed to weed out most content built on that notion, but not so at sites without editors. We're talking HubPages.com, where a dummy who called himself Joer4x4 (real name Joe Reichart) once held forth on "Peak Oil or Nonsense - Are Wells Refilling or Running Dry?"¹ 


Joe's level of dumbassery about the oil business is quite impressive. take for instance, his belief that...

Fossil Fuels for Dummies

As Dire Straits once said, "sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug." Around the Antisocial Network, we have a corollary: sometimes the dumbass is the freelancer and sometimes the dumbass asked the question. If you're greedy enough, though, you could always pick up fifteen bucks or so from Demand Media Studios for writing stupid answers to stupid questions. That's what J. T. Barett did for the Seattle PI "education" section by informing us "What Do Fossil Fuels Look Like?"¹ Yeah, a truly stupid question, but hey: for a few dollars, some people will "answer" anything. You'd hope that the answer would be accurate, but Barrett's answer is... well, it's half-assed (the question probably deserved a half-assed answer, though). Here's why we think so:

"Demystifying" Drilling for Oil, the Dummy Approach

Pangea

Our staff geologist started in the oil industry in 1980: meaning more than thirty-five years’ experience in a field that pretty much mystifies a lot of people. Thankfully, there are citizen journalists out there to “demystify” the oil and gas industry, learned folk like Melvin Porter, who hung his hat over at HubPages.com – or maybe it’s Squidoo; we always get the two confused. 

Anyway, Mel took it upon himself once upon a time to educate the public on an industry where our guy's spent more than half his life, posting something he called “Oil Well Drilling: Explained.” Thanks ever so much, Mel, for all the laughs, that is. Why don't we start with your concluding paragraph, in which you explain the process known as completion (follow the link to the Schlumberger Oilfield glossary entry on the topic)? Mel said,