Oil&Gas

English for Global Industries

Oil and Gas

Steve Oliver

Contents

Sections	Units
1
	1.1	A Global Giant
Oil and Gas	1.2 Presenting the Company
	1.3	The Marketing of Oil and Gas Services
	1.4	Oil and Gas Accountancy
	1.5	Framework
	1.6	Environmental Impacts
	1.7	The Development of an Oil and Gas Company
	1.8	Financing an Oil and Gas Operation
2	2.1	Rig Locations
Working on a Rig	2.2 Offshore Platforms and Vessels
	2.3	Jobs on the Rig
	2.4	Working Conditions
	2.5	Health and Safety
	2.6	Maintenance and Repair
	2.7	Rig Erection and Dismantling
	2.8	Rig Automation
3	3.1	Drilling for Oil and Gas
Drilling Operations	3.2 The Hoisting System on a Drilling Rig
	3.3	Power Systems
	3.4	Rotating Systems
	3.5	Circulating systems
	3.6	Drilling Problems
	3.7	Preventing Blowouts
	3.8	Optimised drilling
4	4.1	Formation Characteristics
Geological and	4.2 Petroleum Traps
Geophysical Operations
	4.3 Geological Consulting to the Oil and Gas Industry
	4.4	Petroleum Mapping
	4.5	Seismic Surveying
	4.6	Mud-logging
	4.7	Wire-line Well Logging
	4.8	Anatomy of an Oilfield
5	5.1	Well Completion
Producing and Delivering	5.2 Surface Treatment
	5.3	Work-over
	5.4	Petroleum Production
	5.5	Improved Oil Recovery
	5.6	Pipelines
	5.7	Tankers
	5.8	Science in the Oil and Gas Industry

Introduction

3

The Business of Oil and Gas

The Business of Oil and Gas

A global giant

Oil and Gas is a global industry. As a worker in this industry you are part of a vast international network. As you travel with your work, you will meet people from many different countries and will need to be able to discuss issues affecting the oil and gas industry. This unit focuses on the vocabulary which will help you to converse in English about those issues.

Unit 1

Section 1

A

Focused reading

Word pairs. Read this introduction to the oil and gas industry, which you might find in any online encyclopaedia. Notice the pairs of words (e.g. ‘oil and gas’ or ‘mergers and acquisitions’). Make a note of any others you can find.

The oil and gas industry is one of the largest in the world. It is made up of a small number of conglomerates and a very large number of smaller independent companies.

Generally speaking, the industry is divided into two areas. Upstream operations involve exploration and production, often known as E & P, while downstream operations involve transportation, refining, and sales of products to consumers.

Relationships between companies can be very complex. They can be competitors with each other or they can be suppliers and customers of one another. Large companies make joint ventures with each other for specific projects and there are frequent mergers and acquisitions. Since the integration of oil and gas technology, this happens even more often.

Oil and gas production takes place onshore and offshore. Oil and gas companies are engaged in a constant search to discover new reserves and to obtain extraction rights in proved reserves. Construction of drilling wells and rigs is an enormous risk and companies need to calculate supply and demand in order to be certain that an operation will be profitable before it comes on stream.

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B Getting the facts straight. Read these extracts from internet websites relating to the oil and gas industry. Which of these statements are:

1purely factual?

2intended to show the importance of the oil and gas industry to the global economy?

3intended to promote one particular oil company?

a ‘As the global economy evolves and expands, it presents enormous opportunities for the energy industry. We estimate that the world’s oil and gas needs will grow forty percent by 2030’ (Rex W. Tillerson, Chairman and CEO, ExxonMobil).

b ‘Proved reserves of oil are generally taken to be those quantities that geological and engineering information indicates with reasonable certainty can be recovered in the future from known reservoirs under existing economic and geological conditions’ (www.bp.com).

Proved reserves at end 2006

Thousand million barrels

					742.7
			117.2	144.4
		103.5
40.5	59.9
Asia Pacific	North America	S. & Cent. America	Africa	Europe & Eurasia	Middle East

c‘Without oil and natural gas, quality of life would decline and people in developing nations would not be able to improve their standard of living’ (www.spe.org).

d‘Strong demand from oil and gas producers has pushed rates for offshore drilling rigs to record highs, prompting many companies to build new rigs to meet the strong demand’ (www.reuters.com).

e‘Shell E&P is engaged in the upstream activities of acquiring, exploring, developing and producing oil and gas’ (www.shell.com).

		Website accuracy. In many online encyclopaedias, readers can edit information themselves
	C
		if they believe the information is false.
		If you read these statements would you wish to alter them? Use a search engine such as
		Google to research and check your answers.

aThe world produces and consumes 75 million barrels of oil a day.

bThe USA consumes 25 per cent of the world’s supply of oil.

cChina is the second largest consumer.

d68 per cent of the world’s oil reserves are in the Middle East.

eThe price of a barrel of oil quadrupled from US$3 to $12 in the 1973 oil crisis.

fThe Thunder Horse platform in the Gulf of Mexico was hit by two hurricanes in 2005.

gThe biggest oil field in the world is in Venezuela.

hOil and gas conglomerates employ 70 per cent of their resources on upstream operations.

iSakhalin 2 was the first integrated oil and gas project in Russia.

Section 1 Unit 1 Oil and Gas

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Section 1 Unit 1 Oil and Gas

12

Vocabulary-building activities

1Partnerships and prepositions. A word partnership is where two or more words are used together often enough to be considered as a fixed expression. Prepositions, or linking words, have an important role to play in word partnerships.

Here are a number of word partnerships in sentences. Write either of the prepositions ‘of‘ or ‘for’ in the space and highlight the part of each sentence you think is a word partnership. The first is done for you.

a

Demand

for

oil

will continue to increase until 2015.

b

The market

liquefied natural

gas is growing steadily.

c

Consumption

fossil fuels has

declined slightly in recent years.

d

The supply

North Sea Oil can

be maintained until around 2024.

e

Transportation

oil presents

many security risks.

f

Reserves

natural gas are being

found almost daily.

g

Drilling

oil and gas is a major

part of our upstream operations.

h

The extraction

oil at the Burgan

field began in 1946.

i

Exploration

oil and gas has

been going on for over 100 years.

j

Production

gas from deep-

water reserves is our main area of expertise.

2 Word families. A word family is where a number of words can be made from the same root word.

Complete this table with words from these families, which are taken from the Focused Readings A to C, opposite.

3 Fill in the blanks. BP is an example of an oil and gas company operating globally.

This is an extract from its website describing its operations in Europe.There are a number of words missing from the document. Fill in the blanks with the right word from each group of words given below.

Refresh!

Using one of the strategies for consolidating and storing new vocabulary recommended in the Introduction, refresh what you have learnt in this unit before going on to the ‘Put it to work!’ activity below.

Verb	Noun (abstract)	Noun (person)
operate	operation	operator
extract
	competition
	acquisition
		consumer
produce
explore
sub-
contract
	supply
transport

London is where BP’s corporate headquarters are [a], and the UK is therefore a centre

for many of its mainstream business functions. The UK is also home to three of BP’s major

global research and technology				[b].
Our		[c] and production business in

Europe covers the North Sea – both the UK and Norway – and also The Netherlands. In Russia, we have an important joint venture through our

50 per cent		[d] of TNK-BP, a major
oil company with the majority of its assets
in Russia. We are involved in a number of E&P

projects in Azerbaijan, and are leading the Baku- Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline project.

Refining and marketing activities are spread throughout Europe, with BP owning or having a stake in nine [e] across the region. BP retail sites are a common sight in several European

countries. In Germany we						[f] under
the ARAL brand. We also sell lubricants and
other oil products in Europe to both
[g] and business customers.
a	locate	located	locating		location			locations
b	group	grouped	grouping		group			groups
c	explore	explored	exploring		explorer			exploration
d	own	owned	owning		owner			ownership
e	refine	refined	refining		refinery			refineries
f	market	marketed	marketing		market			–
g	consume	consumed	consuming		consumer			consumers

Put it to work !

Describe aspects of the oil and gas industry in your country of origin.

Glossary

Essential oil and gas vocabulary

oil field	where oil can be found and produced.
upstream/ downstream	the two directions of the oil and gas industry: upstream is exploration
	and production (E&P); downstream starts with distribution to refineries
	and finishes with sales of products to end-users
onshore/ offshore	gas and oil can be found underground (onshore) or underwater (offshore)
proved (or proven) reserves	reserves where oil can be found with a very high degree of certainty
come on stream	when oil starts to flow from a field, the field is said to ‘come on stream’
to extract oil (extraction)	to get oil from the ground
explore (exploration)	to look for oil and gas
recover (recovery)	to find and produce oil or gas from a field
platform	where offshore exploration and drilling for oil and gas is done
producer (to produce/ production)	the company that produces (finds and drills for) oil or gas
operations	activities of work and business, such as exploration, extraction,
(to operate/ operator)	transportation, etc.
transportation (to transport)	carrying goods (for example oil or gas) from one place to another
Essential business vocabulary
super-major/ giant/multi-national	different terms for a very large company
market leader	the biggest company in a sector of an industry
competitor (to compete/	another company operating in the same business as your company
competition)
supplier (supplies/ to supply)	a company which sells products or services to your company
subcontractor (to subcontract)	a company that works for another company on contract
subsidiary	a company owned by another company or group
headquarters	the main offices of a company or group
to contract out/ a contractor	a lot of E&P operations are contracted out, i.e. given to smaller
	companies to do: the company which contracts out to another
	company is the contractor
a joint venture	a partnership between two companies to carry out a specific
	operation
supply and demand	in economics, the supply of a product is the amount that can
	be produced; the demand for a product is the amount that is
	needed by consumers
market share	the percentage (%) of the market a company has
consumer (to consume/	the final user of oil and gas products
consumption)
mergers and acquisitions (to	a merger is when two companies join together financially; an
merge/ acquire)	acquisition is when one company acquires (buys) another company

Section 1 Unit 1 Oil and Gas

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