Answer the questions from the units 1- 6 of Book “A Primer of Oilwell Drilling”

1. What marked the beginning of the oil era in the US?

2. What was whale oil used for?
3. What did they want to do with the oil that leaked out of the rocks in Pennsylvania?
4. What did James Townsend propose and what was his position?
5. What did the worst problem concern?
6. What was the solution to the problem and who solved it?
7. What was an effective way to obtain oil for Lucas well?
8. Who was Anthony Lucas?
9. Why is the Drake well important?
10. What two drilling techniques have been available since people began to make holes in
the ground?
11. What did Colonel Drake use to drill at the oil creek site?
12. What does a rotary bit have instead of being a chisel?
13. What special feature does rotary drilling give?
14. What is the advantage of being able to circulate drilling fluid?
15. What do many companies include in their complex job?
16. What does and operating company do in order to produce petroleum? Give some
examples of major operators.
17. What does an independent operator mainly do?
18. Who performs virtually all the drilling in the United States and Canada?
19. What do service companies offer?
20. What can the operator of the well logging crew determine by looking at the well log?
21. What is the role played by the rig personnel?
22. Who are some of the people part of the drilling crews?
23. Which person oversees the drilling crew that work on the rig floor?
24. What are the rotary helpers called, too?
25. What is a derrickhand often called and which is becoming popular?
26. What is a monkeyboard?
27. How many rotary helpers does a contractor usually hire and depending on what?
28. Why do the number of days and the number of hours per day that a drilling crew works
vary a great deal?
29. What are the drilling crew shifts called?
30. If 3 drilling crews work 8-hour tours, how can you determine their schedule, and who is on
the site all the time?
31. Where does the representative of the company and the tool pusher usually live?
32. Where may the rigs be located?
33. What personnel do the operating companies, drilling contractors, and service and supply
companies hire?
34. What does the oil industry process and refine, and where do they occur?
35. What or who must drill wells and for what purpose?
36. What two elements is a hydrocarbon made up of? Why?
37. What is the main component of natural gas and what does it have?
38. What are the main components of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG)?
39. Where does crude oil and natural gas occur?
40. What condition must a rock have so that it is porous?
41. What characteristics must a suitable reservoir rock have? Why?
42. Why must reservoir rocks be porous?
43. What is permeability?
44. What shape does a hydrocarbon reservoir have and what does it prevent?
45. What are the two types of reservoir shapes that geologists classify?
46. What is an anticline?
47. What is seismology?
48. What is a wildcat well?
49. What special devices pick up the reflected sounds?
50. Mention the 3 wells that the industry generally classifies them? And which one is drilled in
an existing oilfield?

ANSWERS
1. The small project in Titusville.
2. People used it as a high quality lubricant and as an illuminating oil.
3. If they could recover enough rock oil, they could sell it as a substitute for whale oil.
4. Drilling for the oil.
5. The way people drilled brine wells.
6. Drake solved it. He and his uncle Billy drove steel pipe into the soft ground until it reached
the bedrock.
7. Rotary drilling.
8. He was a mining engineer, born in Austria, supervisor of an oilwell.
9. Because it was the well with which the North American oil industry began.
10. Cable-tool drilling and rotary drilling.
11. A cable-tool rig.
12. It has several rows of metal teeth or diamond cutters.
13. It gives a major advantage regardless of whether the rock is soft, hard or anywhere in between.
14. It made cable-tool drilling disappear.
15. They include operating companies, drilling contractors, and service and supply companies.
16. Obtains the right to drill and produce oil at a particular site (buys or leases that right). Exxon, British
Mobil, Petroleum, Shell, Chevron or Texaco.
17. It produces and sells oil and gas.
18. Drilling contractors.
19. Special support to the drilling operation.
20. Whether the well will produce oil or gas.
21. They run the rig and keeps it running until the well reaches its objective.
22. The tool pusher, driller, derrickhand, and rotary helpers.
23. The tool pusher.
24. Floorhands or roughnecks.
25. A derickman, but derrickhand is becoming popular.
26. It is a small platform in the derrick.
27. Two or three rotary helpers depending of the size of the derrick.
28. Because of the rig location, economic factors, and other reasons.
29. Tours.
30. 7 am. - 3 pm., 3 – 11 pm., and 11 pm. to 7 am. the tool pusher.
31. They usually live on the rig site in a trailer or portable building.
32. They may be near a town or city or in a remote area, such as on the North Slope of
Alaska or in the jungles of Indonesia.
33. Engineers, geologists, accountants, bookkeepers, sales personnel, and trainers.
34. Hydrocarbons and they occur in the earth.
35. Operating companies and drilling contractors.
36. Hydrogen and carbon. They have a strong attraction for each other.
37. Methane. It has one atom of carbon and four atoms of hydrogen.
38. Propane (C3H8) and butane (C4H10).
39. In buried rocks.
40. It has to have many small holes through which oil may flow.
41. It must be porous and permeable and contain enough hydrocarbons.
42. Because hydrocarbons can occur only in pores.
43. Its pores are connected.
44. It has a distinctive shape that prevents the escape of hydrocarbons that migrate into it.
45. Structural traps and stratigraphic traps.
46. It is an upward fold in the layers of rock, much like an arch in a building.
47. It is the study of sound waves that bounce off buried rock layers.
48. It is where no oil or gas is known to exist.
49. Geophones or hydrophones.
50. Exploration well, confirmation well, and development wells. A development well.