It's A Family Affair

Of the 631 drilling rigs working in the United States last week, 614 were rigs drilling horizontal wells in shale oil and shale gas basins and only 17 were drilling vertical conventional wells. Above is one of those 17 vertical rigs drilling a 2,500 foot oil test in South Central Texas.

It happened to also be the very first well a young, 34 year old man ever drilled as a new operator. It was a momentous occassion on multiple levels.

Little wells like this, when undertaken by one man operations, often end up logistical, very stressful ordeals that can last four to five days. Those days involve 100 degree heat this time of year, standing on one's feet the entire time, on the phone, with little to no sleep and shit food from the gasoline station down the highway. Drilling mud has to be overlooked, constantly; mis-aligned directional surveys re-aligned, services ordered to the location in such a way as to avoid wasting time (money), drilling breaks written down, oil or gas shows recorded, rig breakdowns dealt with, bugs down your shirt and up your pants legs coped with and where, and when , to TD the well.

After the 3rd day, exhaustion that can negatively affect the decision making process sets in and new people arriving on location say you smell like a goat. You begin to bark at people for no reason and the thought of another visit to the porta potty disgusts you. A two hour nap in the backseat of your pickup is like a weekend at the Four Seasons.

The constant noise of engines roaring, draworks brakes squealing, chains being thown, mud pumps kicked in and hands shouting at each other can drive you nuts. And, in this particular case, while this well is in progress there are 60 other producing wells that need to be checked, problems solved, downhole hiccups sorted out, oil sold and office matters resolved.

When you are finally done with one of these things it feels you have been run over by a big truck, that backed up and ran over you again, just for good measure. It can take a week to get over one of these events.

If you've never been fully responsible for drilling a well before... when shit happens, like full loss of mud returns to the surface, a good drilling contractor can help, but ultimately it all falls squarely on the operator's back.

Right, cotton fibre used as lost circulation material behind a properly discplaced polymer plug to exactly the right depth, finally fixed it.

Above, Lilly, the rig dog. Lilly belongs to Squirt, the daylight driller. She checked mud, napped under the brake handle, visited the dog house regularly looking for food and when she got wore out she jumped in the pickup to sleep in her bed. She absolutely had a hissy fit over Ms. Catherine's drone flying over 'her' rig.

Tradition has it that one evening during the week all the rig hands and service providers get fed in the typical Texas brisket manner, with all the trimmings and lots of cold ice tea. Tables and chairs are brought out and all the kids arrive with their electric ATV's and coloring books shortly thereafter. Moms, grandpa's and grandma's, land owners, friends, neigbors and partners sit around under the stars in lawn chairs and watch the goings-on.

While the hands eat, drilling is suspened, the well is circulated on bottom and everybody gets to have a look see at the rig, the doghouse, all the equipment on location and the kids get to play a little bit in the warm drilling mud.

No matter when you spud a well envirably it seems to always get logged at night, in the dark. The better wells always seem get logged at night. a proven pheonomena in the patch.

Below, picking side wall core points from the open hole log, with a light table, plugged into the pickup, the tailgate one's office desk.

By bed time the party starts to wind down, the kids all go home and the real work begins. In this particular case it was after 02:oo before the cores were shot. pressed out, bottled up and sent to Corpus Christi for evaluation ... but not before they were looked at under a black light for florescence and hydrocarbon smell.

Production casing was unloaded with forklifts thru the night and at day break the casing crew showed up, to rig up, tally up and run strategically placed float equipment on the casing string, approriately called "jewelry," in just the right places. Once the casing shoe was at TD, the well was circulated three hours preparing the well bore for cementing. There were three benches in this well and the primary zone of interest, permeable enought to drive a pickup thru. Below, bottoms up with mud returns, looking very good...

POB, day four, at 15:35 hrs. I don't believe there are many people left in our country willing, able, and strong enough, emotionally, to drill these kinds of wells anymore, to be good in lots of different things, in all things...to take a geological idea and turn it into an oil well. This is hard way to make a living.

But in the hard of it, comes the good in it.

A sign from above

God Bless the United States stripper well sector. It puts the 'r' in reslience.

It won't be the shale oil sector that saves us, it will be hard working men and women like this, this family, who in the end delivers the type of oil America needs...affordable, dependable; extracted in America, for Americans.