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Dear RDA Members,
We are still getting back to normal around here, but a couple of our working
group members went on rig tour on Monday to try and learn how industry
practices are changing.
Two things stood out upon approaching the well pad, perched high up on a
hillside in a wide valley of mixed forest and meadow country in one of our
northern tier counties. One, it seems it doesn’t occur to those operating
tours that a 300’ x 400’ flat, compacted flat pad, gouged out from the
middle of a hillside, would not be seen as anything other than a sight that
would make anyone’s pride swell with admiration for American mastery of
earth moving skills. And two, there was a 3 ½’ high berm running around the
edge of the well pad, which, except for the access road onto the pad which
is angled down into it, encircles the pad and provides containment for about
3M gallons of fluid should an event occur that needs to have that much fluid
contained.
Another encouraging sign was the absence of a house sized pile of sawdust
for soaking up the liquid portion of solid waste placed in roll off
containers for transportation to disposal sites. As was explained to us,
that particular operator has switched to lime, which, while more expensive,
does a better job of drying out the drill cuttings than the sawdust did. If
this practice was adopted by all operators, perhaps complaints we get about
leaking fluids from trailored roll offs and rail cars carrying gas industry
solid waste would become a thing of the past.
We were led on the tour by a very nice gentleman from Oklahoma with 37 years
in the drilling business. He introduced us to his mostly Pennsylvania native
crew and took us all over the site, including up in the doghouse to see the
electronic information available and to watch while a 40’ section of pipe
was added on to the string.
Drilling on this site was in the early stages and was air driven at the time
with no drilling mud in use. The noise level was not bad as the drill was
electrically powered with the diesel generator units being the loudest
sounds on the pad. There was synthetic drilling mud on site to be used when
the drilling switches from a jack hammer type of pounding while air driven
to a synthetic diamond tipped grinder type of drill bit one would normally
associate with well drilling. He showed us one of these over $30,000 pieces
of equipment and explained how they can be leased or purchased, how they can
occasionally get lost in the hole and if not retrieved in a “fishing”
expedition, may have to be cemented into the hole with any portion of the
well below that cementing completely lost.
Drilling that day was proceeding at about 250’ an hour and things were going
smoothly while our group was on site. One other significant fact we learned
was that particular operator was drilling their laterals (horizontal
sections) about 1,000 feet apart but that they will be drilling “infill”
wells eventually and will be experimenting as to just how far apart the well
bores will eventually be so that they produce the most amount of gas out of
any unit of production without risking “communication” between well bores
through the fractures meeting one another and leading to the gas just going
back and forth between the well bores and not having the pressure to proceed
up the well bores. This is very technical and perhaps difficult to
understand and explain but the bottom line is the number of wells needed to
maximize exploitation of the gas in a unit served by any given pad is still
an unknown (perhaps too, it varies by location) and so, we may be facing
many more, or at least more wells than the industry PR slide of the “spider”
or “pitchfork” pattern of 6 or so wells per pad leads us to believe.
All in all a rig tour is always a very worthwhile excursion and is highly
recommended. At the very least you get to see that on the drill sites the
industry is up made of good people doing a difficult, dirty and dangerous
job well.
