Before 1900 all wells, water or oil, were drilled by \u201ccable tool\u201d drills.\u00a0 These machines had what was essentially a very heavy bar (with a bit on the end) that was habitually raised and dropped in the hole in order to advance it.\u00a0 These drills clanged and banged a lot and were affectionately known as “stompers” or churn drills.\u00a0 The driller would drill a few feet and then would run a “bailer” down the hole to suck out the sand and broken rock to clean it.\u00a0 These rigs worked pretty well in rock and other consolidated material where the hole was competent enough to stand open on its own, but collapsing formations like sand or clay could only be held open by driving in a string of pipe.\u00a0 Sometimes this worked quite well, but in difficult formations where the sand or clay alternated with rock, several strings of pipe, each smaller than the last, would have to be run into the hole to get to a desired depth.\u00a0 It was tedious work and the necessity of multiple stings of pipe often limited the ultimate depth.<\/p>\n
In Beaumont Texas, in 1900, the cable tool method failed.\u00a0 The drillers couldn’t get through the sand.\u00a0 Eventually they hired some water well drillers from South Dakota who had been using a different method of drilling, the rotary method, to do the work.\u00a0 This type of drilling consisted of turning a hollow piece of pipe with a bit on the end through which water was pumped.\u00a0 The hole was kept open because it was filled with the fluid being pumped down the stem.\u00a0 The circulating water had the added advantage of washing the cuttings out of the hole.\u00a0 Even then the drillers had trouble keeping the hole open and could see the need for something thicker than water to hold it open.\u00a0 At Beaumont, in 1900, one of them saw a herd of cows watering at a pond just below the rig and got an idea.\u00a0 When the light went on, he and his co-workers cowboyed the cows back and forth through the pond until it was a gooey mud which they then used for the drilling fluid.\u00a0 The rest is history … the drill went to work, beautifully, and at 1139 feet they hit oil.\u00a0 Their method was proved and the method that they invented is still, in essence, what is used to drill oil wells today, 110 years hence.\u00a0 The well they drilled, Old Spindletop, the most famous well of all time, came in a roaring gusher, blowing oil up through the tower at the rate of 4.2 million gallons per day 150 feet into the air.\u00a0 We have all seen pictures of this amazing site.<\/p>\n
Gushers roaring through well derricks in tales of the oil business, in pictures and photographs and in the movies are a visual icon seared into all our minds.\u00a0 But what is the truth?\u00a0 Crude oil is “dirty”, greasy and combustible.\u00a0 Why “Old Spindletop” did not catch fire is a wonder of the ages, considering that the drill rig was powered by a coal fired steam engine.\u00a0 It didn’t, but other wells were not so lucky.\u00a0 Additionally, how do you contain the fluid from a well that is flowing 4+ million gallons a day?\u00a0 Obviously, something had to be done.\u00a0 The old timers built a berm around the site, creating a pond to contain the oil.\u00a0 Many horses, many fresnos … lots of work.\u00a0 And in spite of all, as more and more wells came in, much of the oil got away, running down hill into nearby streams and thence into the nearby ocean.\u00a0 I have been told that in those early days the State of Texas actually passed a law called the “Two Log Rule.”\u00a0 This was done out of a sense of fair play.\u00a0 The State ruled, that as the oil floated down a river,\u00a0any individual could put a boom of two logs laid end to end tied to a cable stretched across the stream to catch the floating oil.\u00a0 After one person’s log trap filled with oil, the surplus would go around the end of it into the next man’s trap and so on.\u00a0 Need one doubt that there was a nasty mess around some of the fields.\u00a0 Surely, but there is not a trace of it now.\u00a0 Today our government would call the oil that the old timers eagerly gathered an “environmental disaster.”\u00a0 The old timers cleaned it up and made a tidy profit doing it.<\/p>\n
The oil companies didn’t like the oil getting away from them and they certainly were not thrilled with the specter of oil field fires.\u00a0 Using good old Yankee (Rebel?) ingenuity they decided to do something about it.\u00a0 What they came up with was a control system.\u00a0 First, every oil well was overbored to a calculated “safe” depth (nowadays 1000 to 2000 feet deep) and a “surface casing” was installed loosely into the hole and cemented from bottom to top.\u00a0 After the cement set, a very sophisticated system of valves, a “blowout preventer,” was attached to the top of the “surface” and thereafter the rig set up to drill through it.\u00a0 Only then was the drilling for product commenced.<\/p>\n
The blowout preventer is an interesting piece of machinery.\u00a0 It is essentially a stack of special purpose valves that are securely attached to the cemented surface pipe.\u00a0 It consists of a hydraulic accumulator that is a dome like vessel that contains enough oil to actuate the hydraulic pistons that close the valves on the stack.\u00a0 Over the oil in the vessel, highly compressed nitrogen at about 5000 psi or more is poised to actuate the system.\u00a0 The \u201cstack\u201d is a stack of progressively severe valves.\u00a0 Most \u201cgushers\u201d start when the drill bit enters a formation of highly compressed methane that has pressure enough to overcome the weight of the drilling fluid above.\u00a0 When this happens, the drilling mud is blown out of the hole and all hell breaks loose.\u00a0 When the driller senses that a \u201ckick\u201d or a blowout is beginning he actuates the preventer, stopping the surge.\u00a0 The sequence goes like this:\u00a0 the first valve is a donut like an tire inner tube that is inflated around the drill pipe closing the annulus were the mud and cuttings are ascending from the bit; if that fails, the second is a circular clamp in two pieces that closes against drill pipe from two sides that encircles the drill pipe; and that failing, the third is a metal shear the slices through the drill pipe severing it and seals the well like a gate valve would.\u00a0 With preventers on wells being drilled at ground surface, there is sometimes and additional manual valve that can be closed.\u00a0 Many preventers have redundancies of this series of valves built in.<\/p>\n
The blowout preventer has been used on literally hundreds of thousands of wells absolutely stopping the specter of the \u201cgusher.\u201d\u00a0 The blow out preventer is a simple, but highly sophisticated machine and if properly used, as fail safe as anything man made can be.\u00a0 They are a standard, legally required part of drilling an oil well.\u00a0 It would be unthinkable, and fool hardy, to drill a well without one.<\/p>\n
If we have a failure, as is apparent presently in the Gulf of Mexico, it is not due to lack of technology and certainly not from a lack of bureaucratic oversight and regulation, it must be something else.<\/p>\n
Things that come to mind that could have happened in the Gulf are not too hard to visualize.\u00a0 Among some of the possibilities are … the well in question could have been constructed in a non-standard manner allowing the surface pipe seal to fail or there could have been a \u201ckick\u201d that was not detected that allowed the gas to reach the surface and explode, killing the operators before they could react to actuate the preventer.\u00a0 On the knee jerk side … Michael Savage, the radio talk show host, says that the North Koreans torpedoed the South Korean drill rig being operated by a British company in American waters out of spite.\u00a0 On the conspiracy side … considering the Obama administration\u2019s headlong rush to nationalize our major industries, can we rule out sabotage?\u00a0 Why would the failure of one well be the impetus to shut down all the drilling in not only in the Gulf of Mexico, but all off shore wells … and even on-land wells 5000 miles away in Alaska, unless the government was intentionally trying to induce a fuel shortage and to take over the industry?<\/p>\n
The idea that we must have new regulations or a \u201csearch for new solutions\u201d or a “study” to replace a proven technology that has been an industry standard for 70 years is ludicrous.\u00a0 Was this incident caused by the technology or by human error \u2026 or worse?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Before 1900 all wells, water or oil, were drilled by \u201ccable tool\u201d drills.\u00a0 These machines had what was essentially a very heavy bar (with a bit on the end) that was habitually raised and dropped in the hole in order … Continue reading