Extracting resources from the subsurface.
10 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Carbon Dioxide Enhanced Oil Recovery: Untapped Domestic Energy Supply and Long Term Carbon Storage Solution
National Energy Technology Laboratory · 2010
Argues that injecting carbon dioxide into a depleted reservoir does double duty — it recovers oil left behind by water flooding and stores the CO2…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Ore Dressing
Robert H. Richards · 1903
Systematises crushing, sizing and gravity separation into a repeatable sequence of unit operations, turning ore dressing from a millwright's craft…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
De Re Metallica
Georgius Agricola · 1556
Documents mining and metallurgy as practised across sixteenth-century Europe in exhaustive technical detail — ventilation, timbering, ore dressing,…
+5 more at this level
12 of 13 works
National Energy Technology Laboratory
Argues that injecting carbon dioxide into a depleted reservoir does double duty — it recovers oil left behind by water flooding and stores the CO2 underground afterward — and works out how much US oil and storage capacity this makes available.
National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling
Traces the Macondo blowout to a series of identifiable engineering and management failures at BP, Halliburton and Transocean, and argues the industry's safety culture, not any single decision, was what let them compound.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert H. Richards
Systematises crushing, sizing and gravity separation into a repeatable sequence of unit operations, turning ore dressing from a millwright's craft into an engineering subject with its own textbook.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George J. Young
Works through mine planning from ore-body exploration to development and stoping method, arguing the choice of mining method is dictated first by the deposit's geometry, not by equipment preference.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Energy Information Administration
Traces how horizontal drilling moved from an expensive novelty to routine practice once directional-control technology matured, and argues its real payoff is exposing far more reservoir contact per well rather than simply reaching new targets.
Mine Safety and Health Administration
Traces the explosion that killed twelve miners to lightning igniting methane in a sealed-off area with an inadequate seal, and argues the disaster exposed a gap in emergency communication and self-rescue equipment that ordinary regulation had not addressed.
Mine Safety and Health Administration
Traces the 2010 explosion that killed 29 miners to accumulated methane and coal dust that ordinary maintenance and ventilation practice should have prevented, and argues the failure was managerial as much as technical.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Georgius Agricola
Documents mining and metallurgy as practised across sixteenth-century Europe in exhaustive technical detail — ventilation, timbering, ore dressing, smelting — and remained the standard reference on the subject for two centuries.
link checked 17 Sept 2026E. L. Rawlins & M. A. Schellhardt
Develops the empirical back-pressure equation relating a gas well's flow rate to the pressure drawdown that produces it, giving the gas industry its standard method for testing a well and rating its open-flow capacity.
G. E. Archie
Relates a rock's electrical resistivity to its porosity and water saturation through a simple empirical law, giving well logging its founding quantitative method for reading a reservoir from the surface.
link checked 17 Sept 2026S. E. Buckley & M. C. Leverett
Derives the frontal-advance equation describing how a displacing fluid moves through a reservoir, the founding theoretical treatment of waterflooding and a core method still taught in reservoir engineering.
A. F. van Everdingen & W. Hurst
Solves the diffusivity equation for pressure behaviour in a bounded reservoir with an active aquifer, giving reservoir engineers the standard method for calculating water influx and predicting how reservoir pressure declines under production.