I'm no scientist or engineer, and this book certainly wasn't going to make me one. However, it is remarkable how many of the ideas that the book introduced stuck with me and made me think about how to "engineer" similar solutions elsewhere in my life - extracting oil is like the elicitation of something from another person, and refining is building relationships.
The book explains primarily the upstream and midstream processes - exploration, extraction, transfer, refining, and reduction. It's amazing how many things people can make from the black sludge below, and I'm particularly impressed by the types of thinking necessary for a successful oil man.
One invention that particularly fascinates me is "slickwater" where hydraulic fracking is improved by increasing fluid throughput. This isn't done by widening the radius of the piping - but by adding chemicals to the water that make it flow faster. This idea in itself has massive application in marketing, negotiation, relationships and much else.
Other than that, aeration of crude feedstocks, horizontal and directional drilling, and many other ideas teem with creative application elsewhere in one's life. I thank this book not for teaching me how to dig for oil (lord knows that's not a sustainable or blue-ocean business), but how to dig into my latent creative oilfields.
9/10