"This will result in wells that will make a substantial improvement in the recovery factor just because they are absolutely in the proper place within the reservoir for the purposes of drainage"
About this Quote
The sentence has the unmistakable sheen of corporate certainty: the future tense (“will result”), the calibrated adjective (“substantial”), and the quietly magical claim that value emerges “just because” the wells are “absolutely” in the right place. Andrew Gould isn’t selling poetry here; he’s selling inevitability. In the oil business, where geology humiliates hubris on a daily basis, language like this functions as a confidence technology - a way to make uncertain subsurface physics sound like a solvable placement problem.
The specific intent is reassurance, likely aimed at investors, partners, or internal stakeholders who need to hear that capital spending is disciplined and outcomes are knowable. “Recovery factor” and “drainage” are technical terms, but they’re also rhetorical shields: they lend the statement the aura of engineering rigor while sidestepping messy questions about risk, decline rates, or commodity prices. The phrase “absolutely in the proper place” is doing the heaviest lifting, implying near-perfect information in an arena defined by probabilistic models and imperfect data.
Subtext: we have the reservoir mapped; we have the technology; we deserve your trust. It’s an argument for competence framed as geometry. Put the well in the right spot and the oil will comply.
Context matters because “proper placement” hints at a broader industry shift: from brute-force drilling to data-driven optimization (3D seismic, reservoir simulation, horizontal wells). The line is less about geology than governance - a leader translating technical complexity into a clean story of control, where uncertainty is downgraded to execution.
The specific intent is reassurance, likely aimed at investors, partners, or internal stakeholders who need to hear that capital spending is disciplined and outcomes are knowable. “Recovery factor” and “drainage” are technical terms, but they’re also rhetorical shields: they lend the statement the aura of engineering rigor while sidestepping messy questions about risk, decline rates, or commodity prices. The phrase “absolutely in the proper place” is doing the heaviest lifting, implying near-perfect information in an arena defined by probabilistic models and imperfect data.
Subtext: we have the reservoir mapped; we have the technology; we deserve your trust. It’s an argument for competence framed as geometry. Put the well in the right spot and the oil will comply.
Context matters because “proper placement” hints at a broader industry shift: from brute-force drilling to data-driven optimization (3D seismic, reservoir simulation, horizontal wells). The line is less about geology than governance - a leader translating technical complexity into a clean story of control, where uncertainty is downgraded to execution.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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