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So you've had your coffee, done your math homework, and now it's time to celebrate. So break out the champagne (or if you don't want to waste it, try a bottle of soda water, but open it in the sink). Like all good celebrations you shake the bottle before opening it, and champagne sprays around and everyone is cheerfully soaked. But if you then put the bottle down, you would see that the gas pressure in the wine (or soda if you are as cheap as I), has only pushed out about a third, or less, of the wine out of the bottle.
That is, sort of, what happens with an oil well. Everyone has seen the gusher that shoot up into the air in the old movies, covering the dancing hero and his girl in oil. But the pressure that pushes the oil out of the ground is like the gas in the wine, it can only push so much of the oil out of the ground and the pressure is relieved, and the oil flow stops. In many places there is not enough pressure even to start a flow, and there pumping has to be used from the beginning.
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