Rig Tour Report
RDA - Responsible Drilling Alliance
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.