RE: Tweet from hur20 Jun 2019 21:30
bartlebobton,
"The mixture of truth, double speak and newspeak.... Using wrong words ie ...fractured basement, is careless, as it could be seen as manufacturing "truth" ..."
Oh no. Don't get me going... On that thorny subject of Oilfield Linguistics, the opaque, arcane and obscure language used, and etcetera.... Except you have, so here goes. Disinterested readers can turn to page 94 and save themselves some time.
We were talking about the term 'fractured basement' and how that could be a misconstrued term. Someone suggested 'weathered basement', but that would be wrong in our WoS context. But how about the use of the word 'basement' itself?
Say the word 'basement' to the man on the Clapham bus, ask him what it means, and he'll come up with something corresponding with a cellar. A sort of room below the ground level of a house. But this isn't the original meaning of the word, dating from the 18th century. In fact it's a synonym for the foundations of a house, or other building. The use of it as a synonym for a cellar came later.
Now the oilfield or more particularly the language, mainly comes from America. And newly arrived on that continent, the settlers had a lot more on their minds than to let language 'evolve'. So 'basement' retained its old meaning, up to and including the time that oilwell drilling kicked off.
Of course 'back then', they were drilling for 'conventional' fields, sandstones and limestones. And when the bit slowed down 'cos they'd encountered granite or some other bedrock, they'd say "we've hit the basement". So the term stuck. Basement equals the underlying impermeable bedrock or 'foundation', which until relatively recently people thought couldn't contain oil, but from which a tankerload of the stuff reached Rotterdam just today, thanks to Hurricane Energy.
If you think about it, the term 'fractured basement' must sound rather weird to the bloke on the bus. A sort of cellar with cracking walls, something like that. And don't get me onto the word 'cellar' in oilfield terms, because that's something completely different. As in 'cellardeck', 'cellarpump', and so on, and even then the meanings change depending on whether you're onshore or offshore...
Really, instead of 'fractured basement', the best description would be 'Naturally Fractured Foundation Rock' (IMHO). Because what Hurricane's drilling remains the 'foundation' on which sedimentary layers were subsequently deposited, and it's within those layers that the oil itself formed. But then came tectonic movement, the 'foundation' was uplifted and fractured by the stress, and the oil migrated from some of those sedimentary layers into the spaces formed by the fracture matrix.
OK, I'm running out of space, I'm hungry, and am going to cook some supper, probably followed by a beer at my local café. End of Oilfield Linguistics lesson number 18.
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