On the journey through Energyland™, there are many bamboozling words or phrases that cross our path. Then there are some which are just pretty entertaining. Here’s a few of them:  

1) Spudding: (very descriptive…‘let’s spud!’) Is the initial drilling of a well.  

2) Pitcheblende: Doth sound like ‘tis plucked from the Middle Ages, but ’tis not. It is actually uranium oxide (U3O8), the main component in uranium ore.  

3) Pondage: (to be used emphatically - ‘hey! nice pondage!’). The amount of water held in a reservoir for short periods to regulate natural flow at a hydroelectric dam.  

4) Bradenhead Squeeze: Sounds like a hussle (‘…first I got stung by the Kansas City Shuffle, then last week I fell for the Bradenhead Squeeze…’) or a football play – but is a process used to repair a hole in the casing on a rig by pumping cement down tubing or a drill pipe.  

5) Acronyms: There are 17,352 acronyms used in the energy world, sprouting such sentences as ’there’s a CAFÉ  in place so don’t BANANA or NIMBY‘. 

6) Fugitive emissions: Open to interpretation, this means unintended leaks of gas from the processing, transmission, and/or transportation of fossil fuels.  

7) Foot candle: It’s not what you think (…if you‘re thinking of illumination to show off your shoes in a power cut). It is a unit of illuminance on a surface that is one foot from a uniform point source of light of one candle (and is equal to one lumen per square foot).  

8) Derrick: (named after Derrick Rose). A frame tower that supports the drill equipment used to find oil and natural gas.  

9) Roof Pond : (not a hillbilly swimming pool). A solar energy collection device consisting of containers of water located on a roof that absorb solar energy during the day so that the heat can be used at night or that cools a building by evaporation at night.  

10) Thermocouple: (sounds like the name of a superhero husband-and-wife tag-team). A device consisting of two dissimilar conductors with their ends connected together. When the two junctions are at different temperatures, a small voltage is generated. 

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