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When Hubbert presented the results at the Amsterdam conference, “it wa — Petroleum engineering

"When Hubbert presented the results at the Amsterdam conference, “it was very well received by the highest level technical people,” he recalled, “accepted completely, with no significant criticism.” After this vote of confidence, Shell organized training sessions on the new analysis for its field engineers. When it came time for the first course, Willis was away so Hubbert gave it himself. “What I discovered was that the theoretical argument was having no effect whatever on these men,” Hubbert recalled. The engineers were absolutely sure that the fractures were horizontal. Every article, every ad on fracking showed fractures oriented that way. They had been “completely brainwashed,” Hubbert thought. “They didn’t have any real evidence, but they’d been so thoroughly indoctrinated on this thing that they knew damned well these fractures were horizontal.” It mattered, because if they didn’t understand the forces at work, they couldn’t control it precisely. The technique would remain more art than science."
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Petroleum engineering
Petroleum engineering
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Petroleum engineering is a field of engineering concerned with the activities related to the production of hydrocarbons, which can be either crude oil or natural gas or both. Exploration and production are deemed to fall within the upstream sector of the oil and gas industry. Exploration, by earth scientists, and petroleum engineering are the oil and gas industry's two main subsurface disciplines,

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"The results in Poland to date indeed have been disappointing,” concedes geologist Scott Stevens of ARI. He says that the main reason for the unproductive wells was “extremely high” stresses in the rock, which makes fracking less effective. “There was no way that the exploration companies could know that in advance,” he notes. Nonetheless, he argues, “It is too soon to dismiss Polands extensive shale potential.” Given the limited available data, he does not see a reason to revise ARIs estimate."
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"Unlike Ahab (spoiler alert), Drake wasn’t destroyed by his discovery — at least not instantly. But although he was the first to engineer a successful oil-drilling system, lining his well with pipe to keep it from caving in, he never patented the method, and the money he’d made when he struck oil soon dried up. A century later, TIME referred to him as “a sickly, bearded failure of a man in a stovepipe hat” in a story that nonetheless acknowledged that “[t]hough Discoverer Drake wound up virtually penniless and forgotten, his find opened the scramble for oil across the land,” inspiring a legion of oil prospectors to chase what had become, by 1959, “the greatest single source of wealth in America.”"
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"“Scores of papers on injection-induced earthquakes were published in the geophysical literature in the following 40-plus years, and the problem was well understood and appreciated by seismologists,” says Bill Ellsworth, a Stanford University geophysicist who launched his career at the USGS while the Rangely experiment was under way. He believes professional skepticism slowed the formation of a consensus. “There were a lot of doubts expressed by very good petroleum engineers that [earthquakes caused by injection wells] were even possible,” he says. “Knowledge of the whole physical process was either lost or had not been effectively communicated to a broad community.”"
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Petroleum engineering