Tales from the Oil Field of Bygone Days: A Strange World But Ya Tend to Miss It (Part 1)

Tales from the Oil Field of Bygone Days: A Strange World But Ya Tend to Miss It (Part 1)

Now I didn’t go for an M.S. degree and my grades were not that great (my flowering as a scientist came a bit later) so my first geology job was as a mud logger in the Appalachian Basin. We worked all over, eight states in total including a couple in the Illinois Basin. Nearly all of the jobs involved air drilling. Some they would mud up before they drilled into the reservoir and some they would mud up after drilling and flaring the well through the flow line (the bluey line). At times it got pretty exciting with up to a hundred foot pressurized flames that roared, whistled, and shook the ground. Air drilling was fast drilling. We didn’t have computers but electric typewriters and sometimes an ancient all metal manual one for backup. We used rulers to make plots and ammonia to make copies. You learned a lot being stuck in the field for hours on end in rural areas. Sometimes you had tons of free time and sometimes you were extremely busy. I am not the most mechanically inclined person and there are still some gaps in my knowledge of drilling rigs and associated equipment but having been around them quite a bit I guess I know and understand enough. I always try to focus on how things relate to geology and reservoir engineering.

One time after I had just learned about pipe stretch I got to see a stuck drill string break. We had a small plastic wheel, the “rig runner,” we would have to climb on top of the ‘doghouse’ and hook up to the geolograph cable. With electronics transferred to a moving paper chart this measured each pipe from when it was twisted on to when it was drilled down, usually about 31 ft. In this case the drill pipe was stuck and they were pulling on it increasing the hydraulic pull. I noticed that the position indicated about 37 ft which would mean that the drill string (at about 7200 ft in depth) had stretched about 6 ft. There was some stretch due just to the drill string weight but this was more than I had seen. I went up to the rig and mentioned that I was seeing pipe stretch. I went back to the trailer and after a while I heard a loud noise and saw the rig derrick weaving back and forth. They had broken the drill string and would have to plug it back and redrill it. I got to go home after that. 

The very first well I worked on was in a corn field in Coshocton County, Ohio. We had got there late and had to back log and were close to drilling into the pay, the Cambro-Ordovician Rose Run Sandstone. Walking around on location I found a very nice arrowhead. We were pretty close to famous Flint Ridge, a major source of high quality flint for Native Americans for millennia. The tool pusher was an arrowhead buff and showed us how they used the arrowheads to skin and carve arrows. I ended up cutting myself with the dang thing, perhaps some kind of weird initiation into oilfield life.

I have worked at several hundred well sites over the years, maybe over a thousand, since 1992. Until late 2013 when I was on site for a logging job and picking and packing side wall cores for grain analysis of pay zone on a pilot well. 2014 was the first year I did not go on a well site since my work was all remote. 2015 was the second year. Now I really like remote work, don’t get me wrong, but ya tend to miss the oil field if you have been there a lot over the years like I have. It was not uncommon to be in the far mountains of West Virginia, Virginia, or Pennsylvania and run into a roughneck I had worked with in Kentucky ten years ago. Even though there is a lot not to like about working in the oilfield: the mud, the typical long drives, trying to find well sites, walking in dark woods with a flashlight because of the mud, roughnecks that were assholes, irate landowners or neighbors, company people that were assholes (although in many cases I was the company person), bad weather, middle of the night logging jobs, the incessant waiting, etc. – ya still tend to miss it.

One time back in the 90’s we mud logged one on a night that hit 35 below zero in Ohio. We had to catch our own samples on that one – typically the roughneck worm caught the samples. It was cold after sticking your hand in that bucket even though the water was warm for a while due to the geothermal gradient about 5000 ft below surface – it cooled down fast. After that night a couple of the roughnecks went to the hospital to be treated for frostbite. In the oil field in those days there was rarely, if ever, a port-jon so you had to do your business in the woods. Of course, this is not acceptable at all in today’s sanitation and environmental standards but it was pretty typical 20-25 years ago. Needless to say it was a fast one that cold morning! More recently, on a horizontal drilling site with multiple work/housing trailers, or “shacks,” that had flush toilets with outdoor plastic septic tanks, I remember a county person coming on site saying we needed a permit to do that in that county. Such was the often confusing intermingling of state and local statutes and ordinances when the shale revolution came about, especially when it came to areas that had little previous oil and gas development then all of a sudden brought in massive amounts of trucks and equipment.