Oil has made fortunes, caused wars, and shaped nations. Accordingly, no one questions the idea that the quest for oil is a quest for power. The question we should ask, Finding Oil suggests, is what kind of power prospectors have wanted. This book revises oil?s early history by exploring the incredibly varied stories of the men who pitted themselves against nature to unleash the power of oil. Brian Frehner shows how, despite the towering presence of a figure like John D. Rockefeller as a quintessential ?oil man,? prospectors were a diverse lot who saw themselves, their interests, and their relationships with nature in profoundly different ways. He traces their various pursuits of power from 1859 to 1920 as a struggle for cultural, intellectual, and professional authority, over both nature and their peers. Here we see how some saw power as the work they did exploring and drilling into landscapes, while others saw it in the intellectual work of explaining how and where oil accumulated. Charting the intersection of human and natural history, their story traces the ever-evolving relationship between science and industry and reveals the unsuspected role geology played in shaping our understanding of the history of oil.

Several excellent books on weil log interpretation have already been published. However, I feel that these books do not place enough emphasis on the inherent uncertainties in tool responses or on the related and very practical problern of selecting suitable data points for statistical or quantita tive calculations. Thus, I have written this book not only to introduce the newcomer to this very complex art and science, but also to provide him or her with the necessary tools to produce better interpretations. The problems at the end of each chapter are essential to a more complete understanding of the subject matter and include many practical notes based on problems I have encountered in actual applications. This book emphasizes that you develop your own concepts and understanding of the underlying principles, rather than acquiring a compendium of knowledge based on certain rules of thumb. If you are to successfully interpret welllogs, you need to be able to apply your knowledge to new problems that may not follow the preconceived ideas and approaches you would follow if you approached weil log analysis from a cookbook standpoint.