The leaves are beginning to change, the nights are cooler and the days are slowly slipping away. It’s the end of August here in North Dakota and winter is on the way. The idea of another winter in this frozen land chills the heart. This summer has gone by far too quickly. It was a busy summer. Working hard and playing harder. I was luckily enough to be on some interesting projects. The favorite so far would have to be the well in Colorado. As exciting as this summer has been and how good this job can be I have had the realization that I could be doing the exact same thing ten years from now. It’s a notion that chills the heart more than the winter winds beginning to blow. The world is full of opportunity if you are bold enough to stand up and take them. I’m not sure what the next opportunity will be but I know it is time to start looking for it. It might be something mundane like running a hot dog stand in a beach town, or it could be something as exciting as being the cook for an Antarctic expedition. In the meantime they keep sending me to exciting projects here. Today I got to look at some formations that I had never seen before like the Broom Creak. This came about because some areas of the Bakken are being filled in. to the point where there is no more room for wells and on the map all the squiggly lines are meeting and running out of space. Normally this means all the cool science projects are long done but luckily for us they have a few left before all the blank spots of the map are filled in.
Sometimes the supper sciencey projects involve bigger drill bits, sometimes we get to see a core job (one of my favorite things to see) but the project I am on today involves what feels like an eternity of wire line. What is wire line you ask? Well a wireline is a special tool very similar to most MWD tools that read the radiation levels of the rock among other things, but this tool differs in that it is attached to a very thin and long wire and is then lowered into the open hole and slowly pulled out again. In a way it is like a radioactive fishing pool. You drop the hook or tool down and slowly real it back in. the end result? We sit around for days and days waiting to see what the tool will say and finally when the tool gets back to surface we get a copy of a very, very, very detailed log. Most of the time the log backs up what we know but it’s like taking a high resolution photo. You know what it will show but the detail is amazing and you can learn so much more. But before we get the logs we have lots of down time for cooking and coloring and discussing pressing issues of the day.
A short recap of one of the big issues in North Dakota right now; the flares. They are lovely to look at and at night look like the empty prairie has life on it. But the truth of the matter is they are waist. Its energy and gas that is just being released and wasted. Why you might ask? Well it’s a complicated issue. Some of it has to do with the capacity of the pipelines and the processing plants and some of it has to do with cost. Surprisingly it is very expensive to get natural gas to market. Partly because it’s a gas. Another factor in why companies choose to flare off the excess is that they can. Right now the law says that they have to capture at least 88% of the gas. When you look at the flares and see how many are burning and how bright and realized that that is only 12% it boggles the mind just how much oil and gas is down there! Now that’s the law but with all legislation there are some loopholes and exceptions. Turns out most complies are not living up to the 88% rule. In the first year that a well comes on line they can flare without paying taxes or royalties on the wasted gas. And man are those flares big! The first year the flares sound like a jet engine! But after the first year the oil companies can ask for (and almost always get) an extension to keep flaring. Starting the first of the year the new law will limit it to only 10% being allowed to burn. It’s only a 2% change but it is a step in the right direction. Other sets will need to be taken as well but that is far above my pay grade. Obviously I don’t have the answers but I know when you see your hard work go up in smoke it makes you question why bother.
Until the rules change here are some flares on wells I drilled last summer.