The Oil Drum

The plot was made by dinosaurs - they created oil (by burying their sh*t in the ground) so that we can cause Global Warming, so that they can come back to reign the Earth.

By Fred Jacquot

October 30, 2005

MORE ON OIL/GAS

Congress is being stupid again by suggesting that the oil/gas industry
be subjected to a windfall tax. Where was congress when a barrel of
oil slid from $80 to $10 back in 81'-82'. Where was congress when 20
percent of the houses in my city of Casper, Wyoming were for sale? To
put this in Biblical terms, oil/gas has been through the seven lean
years. During that time seventy five percent of existing drilling rigs
were scrapped! SCRAPPED! Now oil/gas is seeing the seven good years,
and Congress wants to punish oil/gas for having the foresight to drill
that well fifteen years ago when the product was not worth nearly what
it is worth now.

FROM THE OIL/GAS RUMOR MILL

It seems that in Eastern Montana an oil company has been drilling in
and around a shallow existing field. This drilling project was about
to be shut down because the company hit nothing but dry holes. The
engineer on the project was really puzzled by this because he
absolutely knew there had to be oil down there.

Here is the puzzle. You have existing wells that are still producing.
You have brand new wells that are dry. Why? What is the difference
between the old wells and the new ones? The engineer knew all about
the new wells. So he looked at the old ones. It turns out that they
were much older than he thought, and had been drilled with cable tool.
A cable tool drill simply picks up the bit about ten feet and drops
it. If you have ever drilled a hole through a concrete wall with a
hammer and a star bit you know the process intimately well. You just
keep whacking at it and eventually you have a hole. In the case of a
cable tool you have a hole that goes down to as much as 5,000 feet.
These old wells in Eastern Montana only went down about 800 feet.

The new wells had been drilled with a modern rotary table rig. The
biggest difference between the two methods is that the old method is
dry. The new method uses 'mud' which contains water and a powdery gel
that contains bentonite that has been baked in an industrial oven.
Bentonite is a loose clay material that formed when a volcano blew a
cataclysmic amount of ash over the countryside. In the West, bentonite
is mined, baked, and pulverized to make drilling gel. It is quite
common to see seams and hillsides of bentonite. It has a distinctive
dark grey color and almost nothing will grow in it. It is very
difficult to drive on when it is wet. The experience is like trying to
drive on a twelve inch deep layer of snot.

The light went on in the engineer's head when he realized that the
layers of rock in which the new wells were drilled also contained
bentonite. The drilling mud was sealing off the wells, preventing the
oil from flowing into the wells. So he performed an experiment. He
drilled a new hole down to 800 feet with a rotary rig; this time using
mineral oil instead of water in the mud mix. He hit oil. Then he moved
the rig over 200 feet and drilled a second well using water in the
mix.....dry hole!

On the next well location he used mineral oil again and hit oil at 800
feet. And he decided to go deeper. At 1200 feet he hit a production
zone that is 300 feet thick. Below that he hit two more production zones.

The gist of this is that this engineer has uncovered a major oil
field. When I worked in the oil patch we produced zones that were only
10 or 20 feet thick. He is sitting on a zone that is 15 to 30 times
that. Wow! This may be the biggest oil field find in the U.S. in the
last 70 years, and may be turn out to be the biggest producing field
in the U.S. And the implications of the find are enormous.

The bentonite in the rock he was drilling came from the Yellowstone
caldera, the monster volcano that made up a majority of the surface
area of what is now Yellowstone National Park. When this volcano blew
- this 2 million acres of volcano - it shot ash clear into Illinois.
The areas most immediate to the caldera got most of the ash which
eventually became bentonite and is now trapped in hills and rocks in
the various states. So, the implication is that every dry shallow well
that has been drilled with rotary rigs in the past 50 years in
Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota
has to be looked at again. Just because these tens of thousands of
wells were 'dry' does not mean they did not have oil. A lot of them
did. The water in the drilling mud sealed off the oil and kept it from
flowing.

Typically, in the 'old days', a company would only drill four or five
wells in an area it thought might contain a whole field. If they all
came up dry, the company would move on to the next potential field.
Now, with this discovery, whole new fields will be opened.

The Yellowstone calera was not the only volcano in the West. There was
one nearly as big in New Mexico, and it threw its ash all over
Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. The further west you
travel the more volcanoes you encounter. All shallow oil wells west of
the Mississippi will have to be reexamined now.