When I began my first job, I had no idea how complex the language of the industry I had chosen was. My first project involved analyzing several well logs and creating structure, isopach and net pay maps. Armed with two boxes of logs and a set of interpretation manuals, I began my journey into the oil-field world of special terms and abbreviations. Aside from becoming familiar with the abbreviations for various wireline log types and curves, which I will not mention specifically to avoid being accused of vendor bias, I learned the difference between sands that were porous and non-porous, or tight sands. I felt pretty good about my ability to discriminate between the two, so imagine my confusion when I found a large “Tight Hole” stamp on a well that clearly had a significant thickness of porous sand. So I began a career of learning new terms, applying familiar terms to new things; and constantly wrestling with and trying to decipher the abbreviations that we, as an industry, seem to love. When I began my career, a new geologist was expected to get well-site experience as soon and as often as it was available. My first trip to the well-site allowed me to learn yet another set of terms and abbreviations, some real and some created simply to give the new person (the geologist, in particular) a hard time, hopefully in a good natured sense. You only ask once to be directed to the dog house, an odd place to find the drillers and company man in charge. After a futile search for the blue metal stretcher (needed because the red one was broken) and the key to the V-door, I began to be a bit less naïve. The new terms and abbreviations, such as ROP, MD, TVD, KB, RT (not the resistivity related RT), BOP, joint (which I understood in a completely different context), stand, MW, kelly, monkey board, slips, and the ever confusing “gas units” seemed to arrive in a f lood.
As my career evolved, I constantly had to learn new terms. In most companies just learning the abbreviations for the various entities within the company posed a real challenge. Frequent re-organizations and mergers made this even more challenging. While working on development projects, TVT, TST, TVD became important. Net/gross, perhaps one of the more simple concepts but often used in a very poorly defined or poorly understood sense, mattered. “Walking logs” updip to create net pay maps was a useful concept. Net sand (usually based on a simple GR or SP cut-off), net reservoir (now the porosity cut-off is added) and net pay (finally water saturation, Sw, appears) form a funnel with the values successively decreasing or, sometimes, remaining the same. Seems simple, but I have personally seen analyses and presentations where the net pay was greater than the net sand.
When I was encouraged to attend training courses related to topics outside of my discipline, I became exposed to yet another set of abbreviations and terms: Bo, Bg, RF, VR, k , TOC, S1, S2, S3, Tmax, CAOF, and many others. In my opinion, the drillers are the best at creating abbreviations. My favorite abbreviation of all time came from a completion report on a well my company was participating in. The report followed a perforation job and it read “SISTASF”. Wow! Turns out, this means “Surface inspection Showed That All Shots Fired”. Obvious, no? I have always been impressed by the ability of drillers to condense 24 hours of activity into a single line composed of the first letter of every activity that occurred, even abbreviating abbreviations!
Terms and abbreviations aren’t the only things that can be confusing. After spending many years working domestically and for a single company, I had the opportunity to work in West Africa. It was there that I got tripped up by colors. Everyone knew that oil was green, gas was red and water was blue when colored on a map or on a log. The first set of maps that I looked at when arriving at my new posting seemed to be completely wrong. Our partner had clearly made a huge mistake, as the oil (green on their maps) was structurally higher than the gas (red on their maps). Thinking I had found something terribly important, I went to see my boss who was kind enough to point out that this particular company, in this particular country, used a different color convention.
Most importantly, I have learned to ask when I find a term or abbreviation that I don’t understand. I have seen very senior people pretend that they understand and then, when they began to explain to someone else, realize that they had no idea what they were talking about. Our industry uses these terms and abbreviations (or jargon, if you like) with the assumption that the audience always shares our level of understanding. Following a very good presentation on upstream and downstream strategies made by a former manager to the entire subsidiary, during which everyone shook their heads in agreement, I was approached by several people and asked to explain what upstream and downstream were. We should not be afraid to ask about what we don’t understand nor should we make it uncomfortable for those to whom we are speaking to ask us. Not long ago, I was involved in an exercise related to the way a company wanted to work. The task was to use the model to plan a project to install rain gutters. We raced off and were, virtually, ordering tools, and parts and planning the job. Before we got too far along, it became obvious that at least two of the people involved in this process had absolutely no idea what rain gutters were, even though they were happily and enthusiastically ready to install them.
By the way, my most recent unfamiliar abbreviation came from the header of one of the columns on a mudlog. It was “MSE”. It took me a while, but after asking friends and doing a bit of independent research, I now know that it stands for Mechanical Specific Energy and is a way to measure and help improve drilling efficiency. Can’t go any further than that, but I have learned a little something new.