New Drilling / Fracking Processes?

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Which is why I am guessing a gas lift setup.

Or setting up a CO2 lift.

The casing is different with gas lifts than the older rod lift casings so maybe they are abandoning an old vertical wellsite to redrill horizontal.

Which would explain why they fracked the old wells first.

Can't type well barrelling down a lease road so gimme a few hours!

a reply to: pteridine

I do flare gas recovery (NGL) and gas lifts. The condensate from NGL recovery (C-6 and up) makes me more money than NGL does.

So I get it...

a reply to: Lumenari

The 'old' well isn't very old really, they only drilled it last November.

And when I say they fracked this thing, man, did they ever! Halliburton must have had (150) pump trucks on site all connected together and they had a wall of sand boxes that were stacked 4 high and about 75 units long, with trucks lined up all the way down the road, out the gate and around out onto the county road waiting to bring more in. They had one of the biggest forklifts I think I've ever seen in there too. This thing could pick up (4) sand boxes at a time! That's a BUNCH of weight! I think just one of those boxes must weigh close to 30 tons. They had to bring the lift in about 3 separate loads because of the weight.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

OK... at camp so some observations and prefacing this by saying that I do NOT work in the frack industry but have asked questions as I go out here...

The MOAT (Mother Of All Trees) that you saw with the Co2 and nitrogen trucks meant that they were attempting to open up that well. They were putting about 1400 pounds of pressure on the casing and waiting to see what popped.

Meaning they sanded it in (Frack sand got stuck in a pocket and they lost communication with the well (pressure) OR they lost a drill head to a coal pocket, screwed up and punctured horizons, etc... lots can happen with a frack.

If you lose a drill head and can't blow it out then the well is lost. After all, you're not going to drill through it.

It IS really odd that they would cap all three, but with horizontal drilling the way it is and actual drilling being so much less time-consuming and expensive now they may have just not liked what they were seeing and decided to go another route.

Which would answer your question as to why they just extended the pad and kept going. They have a lease that they don't want to just throw away.

Keep in mind with horizontal drilling, they go down to the horizon and go horizontal (not actually THAT easy, it's a big arc but you know) and then they extend out up to 2 miles in the horizon itself.

So the ends of those three wells could have been 2 miles north east of the pad.

They don't like what they see but they have that 1 acre lease, so they next drill wells ending up 2 miles south west.

Also, they were not bringing water from one well to the other because fresh water goes downhole and it is gone. If you attempted to use production water (the water that comes back up with the gas and oil) then you would run into a couple of problems.

First, up here in tha Bakken production water is about 70 times more saline than ocean water. It EATS metal, pumps, treater heaters, etc.
So you wouldn't want to be pumping it anywhere but into a truck and out.

Second, with production water you have a chance at it having an H2S percentage. If you take that water and add it to another well, you may increase that percentage, making your well unusable. H2S (as you are well aware) is one of our biggest hazards in the oilfield. We call it "One Breath Death", you can't smell it in larger PPM.

We have up here when they frack miles of 12 inch water lines with a pump every few hundred yards. They generally will use a lake, a farmer's pond or when they can't they will set up a containment area (a huge 10 foot high metal pool, essentially) and truck water in.

We had one well that when they fracked it took 4 million barrels of water. A barrel is 42 gallons..

Hope that helped and now off to gas lifts!!!

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Gas lifting is something that is getting popular and here is why.

First, oil companies consider natural gas a waste product, especially where I am because the basin here is really gassy.

If they flare it they pay a burn tax... a flare tax.

If they have a pipeline to get it offsite then they have to pay a line fee to the compressor site.

If they have too much of it and can't get rid of it they have to limit their oil production.

The first 6-10 months of a new well is a LOT of gas that they really have a problem getting rid of.

What I was originally doing was flare gas recovery... I would take some compressors, take the gas out of the treaters and compress it to about 1000 pounds. Then I would run it through a Mechanical Refrigeration Unit or a JT skid, separate the NGL and condensate from the natural gas and send the rest (C-1 through C-3 or methane, ethane and a bit of propane) to the flare, making the burn 90% or so cleaner.

Meaning they were burning less and cleaner so they paid a whole lot less burn tax, got to get rid of a lot of gas at the same time, I sell the NGL and condensate and everyone was happy.

Then came gas lifts.

The concept is that you drill a horizontal well and install an outer casing that has mechanical chokes in it.

Inside you run a smaller pipe (tubing) and extend it beyond the casing at the end of the well.

Then you take that gas that you were separating and processing and send the dry gas (the gas that was going to flare anyways) through a compresser again, back downhole, pressuring up the casing to 800-900 psi. When it is pressured up, the mechanical chokes close, preventing the casing from back pressuring. Electronic chokes are used between the compressor and the well to regulate the injection rate.. each well produces differently so they need to be fine tuned for optimal production.

What that does is build up a sphere of pressure at the end of your well. Where does it go?

Up the tubing and out, at about 300 psi.

So you are essentially taking a waste product, using the equipment you already had at the site and increasing production to a few hundred percent over what a rod lift will do.

Now eventually the well will settle in, there will be less natural gas available, then you put in a rod lift or submersible pump and keep getting oil, without all the hassle of getting rid of your natural gas.

But for the first 18 months all of your natural gas headaches are taken care of, you are producing enough to pay for your build in 6 months and all the rest is gravy.

Somewhere in there I get some money too.

So that is the concept of gas lifts.

Hope it was informative.

And not just a sales pitch... I like what I do and get carried away sometimes.

I'm a "green" girl in the oil patch.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Decades ago when i worked on Rigs offshore i had the chance to peer into the mind of the geologists etc and wonder on the origins of oil and why it is under so much pressure having worked its way under granite .

strange stuff as someone said the gift that keeps giving , it has even worked its way into our blood stream

Is this in the DJ Basin in Weld County , Colorado ? In the DJ Basin They go up tp 1/4 acre spacing . Tha't's why the wells are so close together .

a reply to: Lumenari

Great posts!! (I'm responding to both of your posts here). Very interesting!

Back in the day, I used to drive a winch truck. I started out as a construction worker and general hand, then roughneck. Then my best friend was killed in a MC accident, and I thought we were all immortal until that day. Then I got serious. My parents owned a big construction company and we catered to the oil patch, Texaco and Exxon mostly. I started hauling heavy equipment and worked up to hauling tanks. First it was just water tanks, and that was pretty easy, but then we got really busy and needed to haul sub-floors and derrick parts. That was big gear.

I'd taken two years off from college to do all that. It was the energy hey-days in Wyoming back in the 80's. The sky was the limit for money! The money was just crazy good, but the conditions beyond awful, and you just had to be ready to go...anytime, anywhere and always! We'd let our trucks run 24 hours a day from Novevmber to April just to keep them from freezing when it was -37F below. Just usually left them parked at the local truck stop (Outlaw truck stop, if you're familiar with it).

Man, the stories I could tell about those days!!!

I guess the new Kenworths are okay, but I can't imagine anything which can hold a candle to the old AutoCar's like we ran back then! Those were some bad-ass trucks.

(Note: When I went back to school in Utah, I worked at a machine shop where we made parts for AutoCar. I worked on the axle spacers, and nobody made anything that huge in the industry. Not even two men could lift one of these spacers when we got done with one (double 3/4" steel tube 60" long, all welded). It was the only thing which made leaving that life okay, just knowing how much power, just sheer power, I'd seen back when we'd winch stuff up over the tail roll. Those trucks were some of the toughest trucks ever made!)

ETA - The old AutoCar's didn't go very fast, but they'd pass every other damn broke down rig on the side of the road and power by it with 2x the load on the back!

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

The saying here is that if you think a good winch truck driver is expensive, wait till you hire a bad one...

Last winter we had a simple move... one of our compressor skids needed to go to the shop.

They are roughly 12 feet wide, 27 feet long and are obviously built on a skid. Weigh about 80,000 lbs.

Winch truck got there, hooked up and we watched him break the skid out of the ice. There was a few inches of ice under the skid.

I started to get worried when I watched him about shear the first guide pin off coming over the tail roll but he caught it.

He tipped it up and was working it onto the bed. I asked one of the guys "shouldn't he be putting some chains down?" Because of the ice under the skid.

About then the skid decided to slide off the truck sideways and smashed into the ground.

They had to get another winch truck to get it back on then took it to the shop.

Where he free wheeled it off the back, smashing it into their cement pad parking lot.

The radiators were cracked, the beads on the skid cracked, the crank bearings in the motor had flat spots...

It ended up a $200,000 total loss.

We don't use that company anymore...

a reply to: Lumenari

OOPS!! Not good! Dude sounds like a real jack wagon!

Fortunately I never dropped anything, but I can picture exactly what you described in eerie detail! That was one of my biggest fears, having something slide over the side. Most of the stuff I did was pretty easy. I was pretty young at the time, but I was fortunate to have a really good mentor who taught me a lot of tricks. Plus, I'd always offer to lend a hand if needed, and that led to guys giving you a lot of great tips on how to do things better.

Watching some of the old timers who really knew what they were doing was always a treat, especially with some of the really big tanks. It was like an art form.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

A good winch truck driver is like watching an artist at work... I totally agree.

Couple weeks ago I watched one back up a 108,000 pound compressor in its own building, 18 foot by 34 foot.

He got the skid started off by tying off onto a semi, when it was tipping he unhooked, backed up under flares that were probably blistering his paint and lowered that thing like a feather into a 24 by 40 space.

He was less than an inch off after the drop, asked if that was good enough, packed up and left.

Whole thing took 30 minutes.

The good ones are just fun to watch...

a reply to: Lumenari
My father was an operating engineer and he spent his last 20 years before retirement running winch trucks on cross country pipelines.
His biggest complaint was the difficulty in finding a good swamper.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
a reply to: Butcherguy

I rooted around and had to add this just for you two...

108,000 pounds.



Piece of cake, right?

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
I've worked for oil and gas for 15 yrs. Primarily in the new lay pipeline sector. What I do know about fracking is they need millions of gallons of water for each frack. And the maor issue with that is with all them wells open every frack chemical imaginable ends up contaminating all the surrounding bodies of water. I was working on Conoco Phillips first testing pads they set up out in the middle of nowhere west Texas. The air is so polluted because they were fracking the nasty ass rotten egg bad gas (h2s) off the surface . Then setting up this whole elaborate pad that basically changes the h2s to make it into a usable gas. The big flares all over the place out there is part of that process. It's funny though because while you're out there and ask anyone wtf is it for. You get no answers.