The Petroleum Dictionary

The petroleum industry is unique: it is an industry without which modern civilization would collapse. Despite the advances in alternative energy, petroleum’s role is still central. Petroleum still drives economics, geopolitics, and sometimes war. The history of petroleum is, to some measure, the history of the modern world. This book represents a concise but complete one-volume reference on the history of the petroleum industry from pre-modern times to the present day, covering all aspects of business, technology, and geopolitics. The book also presents an analysis of the future of petroleum, and a highly useful set of statistical graphs. Anyone interested in the history, status, and outlook for petroleum will find this book a uniquely valuable first place to look. This new second edition incorporates all the revolutionary changes in the petroleum landscape since the first edition was published, including the boom in extraction of oil and gas from shale formations using techniques such as fracking and horizontal drilling. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Petroleum Industry contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on companies, people, events, technologies, countries, provinces, cities, and regions related to the history of the world’s petroleum industry. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the petroleum industry.

The first comprehensive dictionary that spans the entire range of petroleum-related research and technology. The Petroleum Dictionary lists and defines thousands of terms relating to geology and geophysics, production, pipeline transportation, storage, refining, petrochemicals, offshore drilling, land drilling and mineralogy.

The most comprehensive upstream petroleum dictionary ever published. More than 20,000 definitions of words, phrases and abbreviations used in exploration, drilling and production with more than 500 illustrations. Definitions are written for use by both nontechnical and technical readers. Extensive appendices that include charts of drilling rigs and a beam pumper, giant oil and gas fields, United States and Canada geological features, sandstone and limestone classifications, drillstem test symbols, drilling and completion records, and many more.

In industry, miscommunication can cause frustration, create downtime, and even trigger equipment failure. By providing a common ground for more effective discourse, the Dictionary of Oil, Gas, and Petrochemical Processing can help eliminate costly miscommunication. An essential resource for oil, gas, and petrochemical industry professionals, engineers, academic staff, and science and engineering students, the dictionary defines over 5,000 technical and commercial terms encompassing exploration, production, processing, refining, pipelining, finance, management, and safety. From basic engineering principles to the latest drilling technology, the text covers the fundamentals and their real-world applications. Alphabetically arranged for quick reference, it contains easy-to-understand descriptions and figures, as well as oil and gas SI units and metric equivalents. Industry newcomers and personnel with no technical background especially benefit from the book’s practical language that clearly demonstrates the concepts behind the definitions.

Excerpt from The Petroleum Dictionary My Attention was first attracted to the language of the oil field in 1925 when at a Currie, Texas, school a third-grade pupil came to my desk to supply the personal data necessary for public-school records. Among the questions to be answered was "What is your father's occupation?" The answer was delivered with all the pride a nine-year-old could muster: "My father is a roughneck!" I was somewhat taken aback, but more shocks were in store for me. I was destined to teach not only the children of roughnecks, but also those of pumpers, roustabouts, toolies, swivel necks, and derrick monkeys. Childhood in a Methodist parsonage had not prepared me for life among people engaged in such unusual occupations. For a few months I was constantly astonished by the expressions that fell from the lips of near-infants who had never known any life or language but that of the oil field. But gradually I came to accept the language as a legitimate and apt means of expression. Its freshness, its peculiarities, and its vividness fascinate me to this day. It was not until early in 1947 that I considered undertaking a serious study of oil-field language. Thomas Pyles, then a member of the faculty of the University of Oklahoma, suggested to a graduate class in modern English that there was a definite need for technically-trained workers to record the language of various industries, including the petroleum industry. Despite the fact that my sex and my family responsibilities offered grave problems in doing field work, I felt I was peculiarly fitted to prepare a dictionary of oil-field terms. I had been interested (though I must admit unscientifically so) in the language since 1925. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.