Oily Stuff

This is the Huasteca Oil Company, Cerro Azul No. 4 well, now a monument maintained by the village of Cerro Azul, along the east coast of Mexico, north of Tampico, and Pemex. This is the sort of tombstone I can only hope for when I eat the dirt sandwich. 

This well was d...

...and another one gets away from somebody at Signal Hill. 

This sort of stuff was not exactly, neighborly. First, it gave all  downwind operators bad heartburn and caused them to suspend operations on their wells. A blowing well like this would soak wooden d...

When I drilled this little well over 30 years ago the little sand at 1,781 feet was clean looking on the open hole logs and upthrown on the controlling field fault. I'd never seen it before drilling in the trend; it just popped out of nowhere, a depositional fluke of n...

Last week there were still 137 HZ rigs running in the Permian Basin. Whazzup with that? 

Oil and natural gas wells make money or they don't. They don't start making money until they have paid back ALL costs associated with acquiring the lease to  put that well on a...

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During busts and layoffs there are a thousand things to do around the house to make the misses happy and renew your position as a fatherly figure with the kids. One can get in better physical shape, clean the shop up, get the yard back in shape,  fix the bad habits the...

Almost two months ago major integrated corporations drilling in West Texas (Exxon, Chevron, etal) and large independent shale oil companies (Devon and Diamondback, to name a few) all brought their financial powers to bare on the Texas Railroad Commission (TRCC) in oppo...

In the well fixin' business there are a host of reasons to have to pull a 'wet string' of production tubing; basically the bottom of the pipe is plugged up and fluid in it won't drain out. When that column of fluid is oil, it's a stinking mess. The big boys with lots o...

Red Adair, Brian Krause and Raymond Henry, Piper Alpha Tragedy, 1988 

Raymond Wesley Henry (1944-2020) passed away June 9, 2020 in Houston; he was 76 years old. Raymond was one of the world's premiere oil well well firefighters and blowout control specialists. He was go...

Snubbing (pushing) or stripping (pulling) pipe in and out of a live well bore under pressure is a really cool thing. Snubbing  becomes necessary when the well cannot be killed, or it is unadvisable to kill it - for instance if the pressure involved is so great a shut i...

Few people realize how often multiple strings of casing were run in old wells drilled along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf coasts in the early 1900's. Multiple casing strings insured some level of wellbore stability in very unconsolidated clastic sands in this basin. Dri...

This cartoon referenced the legal battle between Texaco and Getty in 1987, specifically Texaco's legal counsel and how it had run out of ideas in the ensuing trial.

The cartoons seems even more relevant today, however, and begs the question, whats next for the American...

In rod lift wells there are lots of things often rubbing on each other and sometimes they rub each other the wrong way. Sucker rods rub holes in tubing strings and wells quit pumping, or pump poorly, or pump oil and water emulsions that can be "cut" so badly the fluid...

Romania has a rich and colorful  oil history; it is believed some of the first  wells ever dug, little more than  earthen pits, recovered crude oil in Romania  as early as the year 1440. The first known commercial oil well was drilled in Romania in 1855,...