Oil! Oil! Oil!

Have you ever wondered how you get oil? Are you yearning to find out how much money you can make if you become a geologist? Well, today in science class we learned about the process of getting oil. In order to determine whether a part of land is able to drill for oil successfully, it needs to fulfill the following three conditional requirements: source, reservoir, and trap. Source means that the land is deep and old enough for it to have formed oil. A reservoir is the container like area under the ground that stores the oil. The trap, is the hard rock that is used as a lid to keep the oil in the reservoir. Each student drew three maps noting where the source, reservoir, and trap was located. The idea was that when these three maps were overlapped, we would see where we would drill for oil. The teachers filled pans with gravel and occasionally a "reservoir" (cup) of "oil" (syrup). We had five chances to drill for oil and see if we found any. However, it was not that simple. Every time we moved to a new location and drilled a centimeter we lost thousands of dollars! In order to show us the economic portion of the lesson, we were able to calculate the money we made from oil and subtract the money we spent drilling. My group found 3 oil spots, two measuring 1.5 square kilometers and one measuring 2.5 kilometers squared. After filling in all the given formulas, I calculated that my group made approximately 49.2 million dollars! Although that is a lot of money, if this was in the real world, the government would deduct certain amounts and the company would have to pay all the employees their deserved salary. Then, after deducting these and other amounts of money, I could enjoy the amount of money. This class activity was extremely fun and hands on! I learned a lot from this lesson, as you can see above. I would definitely enjoy doing another activity similar to this in the future.