SW10's Law FAQs

What is SW10's Law?

SW10's Law essentialy states that any estimate of time given to you in the field of Oil Exploration should instantly be dismissed as inaccurate. More specifically, you can expect it to be over-optimistic and that there will be a delay. It can be applied to almost any activity and holds for timescales ranging from hours to months.

As a rule of thumb, if anyone in the oil patch gives you a time estimate, add 50%. Rather like drillers' tape-measures which have 10 inches to the foot, an hour has only 40 oil industry minutes and a month only 20 oil industry days.

Thus a wiper-trip of 12 hours can be expected to take 18 hours and a 30-day well will take 45 days to complete and someone bringing you a coffee after their ten-minute fag-break will be with you in 15 minutes.

Can I use SW10's Law to predict how long things will take?

Perhaps not accurately - but you can certainly teach yourself not to expect things to happen by the time quoted.

Using SW10's Law in its purest form, where the delay is 50% of the given activity time, should help you to manage expectations and eliminate most unpleasant surprises.

I see - but what happens when timescales are revised?

Entertainingly, SW10's Law still applies. When someone tels you that a delay of 2 days is expected, you know it will take 3.

Why does SW10's Law seem to work?

Although it is often quoted light-heartedly, there are some very sound reasons for it. Drilling for oil takes place under very unpredictable circumstances where there can be surprises arising from geology, poor modelling and unreliable data. On top of that, technology (electronics as well as heavy iron) can fail under the arduous conditions - and of course there is always our old favourite: human error.

What are the origins of SW10's Law?

Although not known as SW10's Law at the time, it was first posited in the late eighties by a man sitting disconsolately in the boot-room of a jackup in the Southern North Sea. Neither he nor his crew had had enough sleep and, whilst drinking rubbish coffee, they observd that they were consistently woken up well before they were needed, that they tended to be criticized for overunning when conducting their own operations and, most pressingly, that the cakes were never delivered to the boot-room on time.

It was first referred to on the internet in April 2005.