Houston may be the energy capital of the world, but that doesn't mean the majority of its citizens have a particularly deep understanding of the energy business's inner workings.

But the city's Museum of Natural Science, staffed by a team of dedicated volunteer docents, is trying to change that.

The Wiess Energy Hall has been one of the key attractions of the museum since 1994, and it recently underwent a renovation to reflect newer technological advancements. It now comprises an impressive array of interactive exhibits explaining everything from sediment deposition to biomass.

A group of us Hartsters recently took a tour of the newly reopened hall. I mostly went because I was curious to see the changes, knowing, as I do, EVERYTHING about the oil and gas industry (insert dripping sarcasm here). But many in our group work in parts of the organization where an understanding of oil and gas technology is not necessary for them to do their jobs. So we were taken on a guided tour by a pair of seasoned oilfield veterans.

I spoke to one of them, Don Clutterbuck, after the tour. Clutterbuck spent 40 years as a geologist in the industry and has been a docent at the museum for about 5 years. What types of questions, I wondered, do these guys get asked by the uninformed public?

Quite a few, as it turns out. "The majority of people who come through the exhibit are not from the industry," he said. "They're people who just want to know something about the energy business. One of the things that we try to do is dispel the misconceptions that seem to be totally embedded in our culture."

Many of these, luckily for him, have to do with geology. One of the exhibits is a demonstration of porosity and permeability. Two cores are side by side in clear plastic cases, immersed in water. Air is periodically injected into the cores, and the one with higher porosity and permeability spurts out more bubbles than its tighter, less permeable neighbor.

"I point to the core that has good porosity and permeability and say, 'That is what an oil field looks like,'" he said, adding that many people assume (probably partly because of the term "reservoir rock") that oil is found in large underground lakes and pools.

People also aren't aware of the Earth's layers of stratigraphy - they think it's all a completely homogeneous medium from top to bottom. The museum has several different types of exhibits that display the concept of sedimentation as well as the "pressure cooker" aspect of turning organic material into hydrocarbons.

Clutterbuck said the hardest thing to get across is the concept of time. "If someone is 100 years old, we think of them as old," he said. "But that's not even a nano-second in geologic time. There are two types of time - people time and geologic time.

"I tell them that everything is changing, but it's so slow that in people time we don't see it."

One of the more amusing misconceptions is the notion that finding and producing oil and gas is some sort of dark art. Clutterbuck attempts to point out the relative simplicity of most of the concepts involved. For instance, he tells visitors that geophysics is no different than dropping a tennis ball on the floor and having it bounce back. "The principle is simple," he said. "The execution is more difficult."

It's not a magical business, but it is a business, he added. "It's just like any other business - you look for success, and sometimes you're going to have failures. But it's a business, not a crap shoot."

And despite the deep pockets of some of the larger companies, not everyone in it is a millionaire. "For every J. Paul Getty or H.L. Hunt, there are a lot of people who've gone broke," he said. "It's a risk business, but it has to be viewed as a business and not a large gambling operation."

Many oil and service companies take advantage of Clutterbuck and his colleagues to educate some of their employees. Most of the tour groups are comprised of either interns or members of the support staff such as accountants. Understanding the intricacies of nuclear magnetic resonance logging tools may not be necessary for these people to do their jobs, he said, but it would at least help if they had a concept of what a well log is.

I think it's great that these types of museums exist, as well as the teaching tools that are being used around the world to educate school kids about the industry. It really isn't magic, but it's still kind of amazing to think of all of the things this industry accomplishes thousands of feet underground. That's a good story to tell.

Comments