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Greybeard, oil drilling.
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<blockquote data-quote="greybeard" data-source="post: 953793" data-attributes="member: 18945"><p>A little history......and a bit of explanation of how things worked in the oilfield of the 70-90s for those reading this that aren't familiar with it and some of the terms. This will also set the stage for how I ended up out on the McElroy ranch in the early 90s.</p><p></p><p>I left home right after my 17th birthday and went into the Marines, did 4 years, then immediately went into the Navy for 5 more years. I acquired a wife and 4 kids in that time period and I had a couple months left on my enlistment when my last sea duty was done, so the sent me to a little Naval Reserve center in Lafayette La for my last duty station. I started looking for a real job. My brother was already working for a little 7 rig drilling company up near Opelousus as a mechanic and I had lots of diesel experience from the Navy, so I hired on with that company as a shop mechanic. Land rigs only--no offshore rigs. What my brother didn't tell me, was that with that company, there was no such thing as a shop hand--if you were male and able, if they needed a roughneck on one of the rigs, they came in the shop and said "you-you-you--get your clothes and go to rig 3 etc--they're shorthanded." Some weeks I spent an equal amt of time as a roughneck as a mechanic with that company till they went out of business in the mid 80s. The price of oil had been droppiong some and the operators (the companies that actually had the leases) weren't spending much money--they wanted to hold on to their cash. When I first broke out into the oilfield, the operators were paying by the day--the drilling contractor got paid a set amt of $ for every 24 hours on the hole. That was a good deal for the contractor because if you got the pipe stuck in the hole, you still got paid--it all pays the same--as they used to say. Shallow, quick fast wells might be contracted on a footage basis--the contractor billed the operator by the foot of hole drilled each 24 hrs--not as good a deal as day rate, but better than what began to happen when the price of oil dropped. Operators, began offering a % of the well proceeds as partial or full payment to the contractor. I don't know exactly how it worked, but I know my company had to bring in some engineers to look at the prospective well before we took a job, but this meant the drilling company was on it's own for paying some or all of the drilling costs until the well was completed and began producing revenue. Get stuck, you're eating up tons of your own $. This was common practice in the mid 80s--you either accepted it or stacked your rigs idle and laid your hands off. Like a lot of companies, mine was operating on borrowed money from banks, and the banks were using both the rigs and futurte revenue from the oil as collatoral. When the price of oil dropped to near $10 a bbl, the wells would take forever to pay off, so banks called the notes and the company I worked for went belly up. I knocked around for a couple 3 years, worked as a mech for a Kamatsu dealer in Memphis (where my wife was from)--then went back into the oilfield again as a hand and mechanic for a little 1 rig outfit back down in Cajun Country. Afterwards, I went to work as a machinist for a little machine shop that made stuff for rice elevators and driers, but the owner also had an oilfield service company that provided downhole chemicals--fluids that kept ya from getting stuck and drilling mud additives. He was the kind of guy that would do anything for a buck tho, and developed a process to grind up cuttings from downhole, slurry it, and pump it back down the backside of the casing of a well--basically putting it back where it came from. The market for this had emerged for 2 reasons. </p><p>1. On a big well up in Oklahoma, the reserve pit (a leveed pond) where the excess liquids and wellbore cuttings went had busted and it flooded a farmer's wheat or corn field. It was oil based mud, The farmer sued in state court, then the State got involved and they passed a law in Oklahoma that all cuttings had to be put into steel tanks on site--no more reserve pits. We would travel from La up to Elk City Ok set up on either a completed well or sometimes right by one that was still drilling and grind their cuttings, another little local to Elk City contractor would do the actual downhole pumping as we slurried the cuttings. </p><p></p><p>2. Sometime in the 80s or late 70s, a pipe yard worker came down with Leukemia. He worked cleaning scale from pipe that had come out of producing wells. They did some background investigation, found there was no history of any kind of cancer in his family and started looking for a cause. When a well flows, it produces oil, gas, and salt water and many minerals percipitate out of the liquid column, froming scale over a perid of years inside the pipe. Among those percipitants is Radium and Bismuth--both slightly radioactive and this is known as Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material--or NORM. Not dangerous except if one has a very long exposure to it, but this was deemed the cause of this man's leukemia and suddenly EPA and States' environmental agencies said something had to be done with the percipitants that came from oilfield pipe. It was also agreed, that NORM was non-transferable--if a company owned a well and pipe that it came from, it was their responsibilty for the 1/2 life of the material, which in the case of Radium is over 1000 years. Companies began placing it in steel drums and storing it in fenced in compounds, but after awhile, the drums began leaking, so some other plan had to be developed. The company I worked for joined others in trying to make a few $, and we began going to sites where companies like Chevron, Texaco etc stored the material, we suited up in protective gear, ground the material up, slurried it, placed it into 50 bbl thick wall steel tanks, and it too was pumped down the backside of wells--bacxk where it came from.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="greybeard, post: 953793, member: 18945"] A little history......and a bit of explanation of how things worked in the oilfield of the 70-90s for those reading this that aren't familiar with it and some of the terms. This will also set the stage for how I ended up out on the McElroy ranch in the early 90s. I left home right after my 17th birthday and went into the Marines, did 4 years, then immediately went into the Navy for 5 more years. I acquired a wife and 4 kids in that time period and I had a couple months left on my enlistment when my last sea duty was done, so the sent me to a little Naval Reserve center in Lafayette La for my last duty station. I started looking for a real job. My brother was already working for a little 7 rig drilling company up near Opelousus as a mechanic and I had lots of diesel experience from the Navy, so I hired on with that company as a shop mechanic. Land rigs only--no offshore rigs. What my brother didn't tell me, was that with that company, there was no such thing as a shop hand--if you were male and able, if they needed a roughneck on one of the rigs, they came in the shop and said "you-you-you--get your clothes and go to rig 3 etc--they're shorthanded." Some weeks I spent an equal amt of time as a roughneck as a mechanic with that company till they went out of business in the mid 80s. The price of oil had been droppiong some and the operators (the companies that actually had the leases) weren't spending much money--they wanted to hold on to their cash. When I first broke out into the oilfield, the operators were paying by the day--the drilling contractor got paid a set amt of $ for every 24 hours on the hole. That was a good deal for the contractor because if you got the pipe stuck in the hole, you still got paid--it all pays the same--as they used to say. Shallow, quick fast wells might be contracted on a footage basis--the contractor billed the operator by the foot of hole drilled each 24 hrs--not as good a deal as day rate, but better than what began to happen when the price of oil dropped. Operators, began offering a % of the well proceeds as partial or full payment to the contractor. I don't know exactly how it worked, but I know my company had to bring in some engineers to look at the prospective well before we took a job, but this meant the drilling company was on it's own for paying some or all of the drilling costs until the well was completed and began producing revenue. Get stuck, you're eating up tons of your own $. This was common practice in the mid 80s--you either accepted it or stacked your rigs idle and laid your hands off. Like a lot of companies, mine was operating on borrowed money from banks, and the banks were using both the rigs and futurte revenue from the oil as collatoral. When the price of oil dropped to near $10 a bbl, the wells would take forever to pay off, so banks called the notes and the company I worked for went belly up. I knocked around for a couple 3 years, worked as a mech for a Kamatsu dealer in Memphis (where my wife was from)--then went back into the oilfield again as a hand and mechanic for a little 1 rig outfit back down in Cajun Country. Afterwards, I went to work as a machinist for a little machine shop that made stuff for rice elevators and driers, but the owner also had an oilfield service company that provided downhole chemicals--fluids that kept ya from getting stuck and drilling mud additives. He was the kind of guy that would do anything for a buck tho, and developed a process to grind up cuttings from downhole, slurry it, and pump it back down the backside of the casing of a well--basically putting it back where it came from. The market for this had emerged for 2 reasons. 1. On a big well up in Oklahoma, the reserve pit (a leveed pond) where the excess liquids and wellbore cuttings went had busted and it flooded a farmer's wheat or corn field. It was oil based mud, The farmer sued in state court, then the State got involved and they passed a law in Oklahoma that all cuttings had to be put into steel tanks on site--no more reserve pits. We would travel from La up to Elk City Ok set up on either a completed well or sometimes right by one that was still drilling and grind their cuttings, another little local to Elk City contractor would do the actual downhole pumping as we slurried the cuttings. 2. Sometime in the 80s or late 70s, a pipe yard worker came down with Leukemia. He worked cleaning scale from pipe that had come out of producing wells. They did some background investigation, found there was no history of any kind of cancer in his family and started looking for a cause. When a well flows, it produces oil, gas, and salt water and many minerals percipitate out of the liquid column, froming scale over a perid of years inside the pipe. Among those percipitants is Radium and Bismuth--both slightly radioactive and this is known as Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material--or NORM. Not dangerous except if one has a very long exposure to it, but this was deemed the cause of this man's leukemia and suddenly EPA and States' environmental agencies said something had to be done with the percipitants that came from oilfield pipe. It was also agreed, that NORM was non-transferable--if a company owned a well and pipe that it came from, it was their responsibilty for the 1/2 life of the material, which in the case of Radium is over 1000 years. Companies began placing it in steel drums and storing it in fenced in compounds, but after awhile, the drums began leaking, so some other plan had to be developed. The company I worked for joined others in trying to make a few $, and we began going to sites where companies like Chevron, Texaco etc stored the material, we suited up in protective gear, ground the material up, slurried it, placed it into 50 bbl thick wall steel tanks, and it too was pumped down the backside of wells--bacxk where it came from. [/QUOTE]
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