One way to describe my occupation is that I teach software in the energy business. The convergence of teaching, software, and petroleum puts me in contact with a wide variety of people, from the toughest of roughnecks to the skinniest of computer programmers.

Sometimes we get programmer turnover, and the new guy doesn’t benefit from any oilfield experience, frequently having been hired straight of college and whose main goal in life is to earn that coveted “Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer” certification. Most are smart enough to realize that it helps to know some basics of what’s going on in the oilfield when they write software for it.

I ran into this problem as “Product Champion” and ended up writing some basic tutorials in PowerPoint for them to read. Corporate hadn’t quite adopted a web policy yet. I don’t have the original aids, so I’ll reconstruct as best as I can here. In addition to perhaps saving some repeated explanations later on, I hope it makes the sub-point that there are a lot of decisions made that affect the final price of anything. Thomas Sowell would be proud.

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This article in the Life of the Well series covers logging, testing, and cementing. Logging and Testing help us identify the potential profitability of an oil well, and cementing the well keeps the hole open and environmentally safe.

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Perforating

Logging and perforating operations are often performed by the same people. While logging involves lowering some sort of sensor package down a wellbore, perforating involves lowering a “perforating gun” into the hole for the purpose of punching holes in the casing at a desired depth.

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My co-worker Arabinda had been involved in the Logging side of Halliburton before teaching the same software that I do. He gave me some notes on Production Logging, some of which was new to me. This is a summary of his remarks.

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Customers may choose to stimulate wells either because previous wells in a field have needed it, or because they have run production surveys that suggest that a well may produce at a faster rate after stimulation techniques. Two of the most common stimulation techniques are acidizing and hydraulic fracturing.

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