Oil, Oil Everywhere: Picture of the Week

Home » Picture of the Week February 3, 2010 2 Comments
Endless Oil rigs in Xinjiang's desertOil, oil, everywhere

Along the road between Karamay and Urhe in northern Xinjiang there is a stretch of desert landscape that stretches as far as the eye can see and is dotted with innumerable oil rigs. In Chinese they call them “Christmas Trees” (is that what we call it in English?) and most of them toil day and night pumping oil from the ground to be refined and piped all the way to Shanghai.

2 Comments

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  • Steph said:
    March 11th, 2010 at 3:14 am

    From the Australian oilfield: A Xmas tree is the oilfield term for a wellhead (the blue thing in the picture). Pictured are big pumps which we would call "nodding donkeys" which pump the oil to surface.

    Congrats on the blog, I find it very interesting.

    [Reply]

  • Josh said:
    March 12th, 2010 at 3:37 pm

    Hey Steph…thanks so much for your comments and I'm glad you find the blog interesting.

    I'm especially amused by the "nodding donkeys". Never heard that before!

    [Reply]

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