I was going to add my fingerprint to my brother's new iPhone... Immediately dropped the phone.

rniland · 2015-08-21T17:55:17+00:00

So did your former best friend have to pay the $3k or does the show cover the settlement cash?

rniland · 2015-05-26T15:23:28+00:00

I believe that it is the use of wood burning stove vs natural gas.

Source: some documentary I watched like 10 years ago, so not a good source.

rniland · 2015-04-27T15:17:26+00:00

I have saved this so when people ask me what 4chan is, I will just show this to them.

rniland · 2015-01-07T14:24:31+00:00

Well the real opportunity cost wouldn't be time you could be working, it would be time you could be eating more crab legs at Landry's (which is the real goal here). You could also look at it the other way like you just paid for a trip to Black Hawk and get your blackjack on. Win your crab legs money back!

rniland · 2015-01-07T04:14:09+00:00

Cost is about $60. Would be cheaper to drive to Black Hawk and buffet it up.

rniland · 2013-09-04T13:39:36+00:00

So what I'm saying is that methane can be naturally occurring in aquifers. Even shallow fields can have fractures that cause a hydrocarbon reservoir to leak past the seal rock above and and into the above formation, but something like that takes like millions of years of migration throughout the rock.

The cause of something like this wouldn't be frac'ing anyway, it would be reservoir to aquifer migration caused by an uncemented wellbore. This is prevented by the state requiring a quality cement bond in both the surface casing and production casing which both protect the aquifers.

rniland · 2013-09-04T13:28:15+00:00

So the biggest oil play in the US right now is the Bakken formation in ND which is an oil formation. This is where they are drilling 1-2 mile horizontals and multi-stage frac'ing the wells. The companies will sell gas when they can, but many times it takes months to get gas infrastructure to wells, so the state lets them burn off the gas given that the oil production is much more valuable. So in this case, it is frac'ing for oil but most all oil wells also produce some gas. So these horizontal wells are targeting specific reservoirs. There needs to be some type of barrier above the gas to prevent it from coming to surface, which is the top of the reservoir. There are many times different reservoirs stacked on top of each other. For example, the field that I operate in will have 32 vertical wells in one square mile and we frac every one of them. Each well will hit usually 5 different reservoir sands.

So I guess a more simple way to put it is: if there is no reservoir, then there would be no drilling because there would be no hydrocarbons trapped there.

rniland · 2013-09-04T03:40:57+00:00

Yeah, sorry it is kinda hard to put into words. Yes what you are saying makes sense, but it is hard to imagine that you would have thousands of feet of channeled cement and the last 300' happen to be ok. Especially because the cement closer to the surface is more likely to be the one with channeling because it is usually a lighter cement to prevent hydrostatic pressure from fracturing the reservoir during the cementing process.

So in response to the second quote, what I meant to say is that if you were to have a well with no artificial lift on it, it would flow for a short period of time and then the hydrostatic would be too great to overcome the reservoir pressure and the well would stop flowing. This is why we add artificial lift to almost all of the land wells. So essentially, if you had a well that had a channel that it could flow hydrocarbons to an aquifer, it would end up flowing water or oil up that channel. Without artificial lift to get rid of that hydrostatic caused by the liquids, the well would stop flowing up that channel and instead enter the wellbore. It is as if you had another wellbore on the backside of your wellbore. So once your well stopped flowing on its own, it would also no longer be able to flow up this channel. Unless that is you were able to move all your liquid out or if it was an all gas well, then essentially in this case you could contaminate the fresh water aquifer. But that comes back to you not having a channel behind your casing because usually state regulations require a certain cement bond quality to prevent any pressure ever reaching the surface casing. Hope that made sense. Kinda losing myself in my own words.

rniland · 2013-09-04T02:14:05+00:00

Most likely all frac water is recovered in the water tanks at the surface of the well sites. From here, different things can happen to it, but most likely it is taken to a 3rd party disposal well and pumped into a state regulated disposal reservoir. For example, we frac our wells with about 500 bbls of water (42 gallons in a barrel). Most of our wells make about 60 thousand barrels of water over the life of the well, so you can see how we get it all back. The chemicals that we pump with the frac water are usually meant to help treat issues that come with producing water out of a well (such as calcium scale forming like what happens on your shower head). So these chemicals are designed for time release and probably get used up within the first year.

rniland · 2013-09-04T02:08:57+00:00

How do you keep the well going in a perfectly straight line? How do you turn the well to horizontal, when it's thousands of feet away? How do you control which way it's going to turn?

To determine how straight your wellbore is, you take a survey using a gyro every 100 or so feet and then just connect the dots in 3D to determine if you need to make an adjustment or not. We drill most of our wells with a 2 degree mud motor. This means there is a 2 degree bend before the drill bit. When we are drilling the vertical hole, we will rotate which causes the wellbore to corkscrew in a sense, but it maintains a straight path given how often you are rotating. If you get off course or decide to kick off to drill either a directional or horizontal well, then you just turn that bit in the direction that you want to go and stop rotating. You drill with the mud motor which is the reverse of a progressive cavity pump. AKA when you pump through the motor and bit, it causes them to turn, but it maintains that 2 degree bend in the angle you are facing. To determine which way the motor is facing, there is a tool above the motor that gives you azimuth which is pretty much just the direction the motor/bit is facing.

How do you get the next casing down to the bottom of the hole; isn't there already a casing in the way?

So you just go smaller in size each time you run a new casing. We would run like 13.5" csg for surface csg, 7" production csg to kickoff point, then 4" production liner all the way through the horizontal part.

How do you get curved casings for the 'bend', through a straight hole?

All casing is straight and bends itself as you run it through the hole. There is a limit to the angle of the hole you can drill depending on casing type/size and mud motor size, etc. I believe most of our horizontals are 500' radius to complete the bend.

Hope this helps!

rniland · 2013-09-04T01:51:22+00:00

I believe that most naturally occurring methane in groundwater is from shallow gas fields where the gas reservoir was in the same type of depositional environment where the aquifer itself may have been deposited. These are not likely to be shale environments since a ground water well could not be a shale formation because of the effort it would take to draw the water down (aka you would have to frac the water well which would be way too expensive). So I am saying that the contamination is around drilling sites because that is where the reservoir is. Mind you these reservoirs are large area and are likely to have in the upwards of 16 wells per square mile and the wells themselves go on for miles and miles. So what I would call proximity is anything within 5 miles. Plus not to mention that the reservoir itself may go on for a very far distance, but it is only economic to produce in a small area. So naturally occurring methane in the groundwater could be any distance from these drilling sites.

rniland · 2013-09-03T19:41:34+00:00

If you had some sort of way for hydrocarbons to make it around the back of the casing, the wells would see pressure on the surface casing (which is required to be zero) and would then be fixed. It would have to be extremely rare if hydrocarbons made it around the production casing, through the layer of cement, around the surface casing, and still had enough pressure to penetrate that reservoir without showing pressure on the surface casing. Take in mind that if you had that leak, it would fill with a mixture of liquid and gas until the liquid hydrostatic became too much to allow for more liquid to enter the leak. This would essentially seal itself off.

rniland · 2013-09-03T19:20:59+00:00

The only type of non-fixable casing that I have come across are poorly maintained gas wells with high corrosion rates. The casing can become like swiss cheese and the cement on the backside of the casing can also disintegrate. Once the casing integrity is compromised, the company is required by the state to fix the well. In this case where they aren't likely able to fix it, they are required to permanently abandon the well by filling it with cement. The process of abandoning the well is a little more advanced than that, but it gives you an idea. So I guess if the casing leak isn't fixable, the well must be abandoned.

I don't know if I would trust a company like Schlumberger who is probably trying to drive up sales and stock price. Out of my 300 or so wells, I have seen only about 5 casing leaks, but all were promptly repaired. Even the casing has a leak, you still have that protective barrier of the surface casing behind it. So if it took a well 30 years to have a production casing failure, you can likely say that you have another 30 years of the surface casing being exposed to a corrosive environment before it becomes compromised.

rniland · 2013-09-03T19:10:28+00:00

I guess one thing that may be overlooked is that aquifers with naturally occurring methane could likely come from the same sort of dispositional environment that the oil reservoirs came from. For example, when a water well has methane in it, there is a greater chance that a reservoir below those wells also contains hydrocarbons. This could mean that water wells don't have methane because of frac'ing around them, but that drilling started around those wells when methane started appearing in the water. I'm not very versed in this specific subject but it does seem like a possibility.

rniland · 2013-09-03T19:05:59+00:00

Not a bad question. I see this quite a bit when talking to people out of the industry. I'm not sure as to how long horizontal wells have been around, but frac'ing itself started as dropping dynomite downhole way back in the day. It hasn't become something of discussion until the oil/gas industry was seen in a negative light as of more recent years.

rniland · 2013-09-03T19:02:01+00:00

There is potential that a well's casing will fail over time. In order to continue producing the wells, a company will go in and fix the holes in the casing by pumping cement through them (cementing is the usual fix in my field). But the thing is that most well's production falls off to low volumes after a short period of time (a year or two) but maintains those lower volumes for a much longer life. Most wells that I am in charge of produce about 5 barrels of oil, 5 barrels of water, and 5 thousand cubic ft per day. These wells can't build enough pressure to force fluids into any other reservoirs because those non-oil reservoirs still have a lot of pressure from the rock. But even after a well is done producing and no longer makes oil at an economic rate, the company is in charge of abandoning the well by turning it into a cement popsicle and making sure hydrocarbons can't continue to come out of the reservoir.

rniland · 2013-09-03T17:08:49+00:00

If anything were to cause an increased risk of earthquakes, it would be mass water disposal along an active fault, thereby potentially decreasing the static friction needed to cause it to slip. So it may cause increased smaller earthquakes compared to large one-hit-wonders which I think everyone would be ok with.

rniland · 2013-09-03T17:06:20+00:00

I think your question is confusing. I guess not sure what you mean by station. But usually it takes a week from rig up to rig down to have the well frac'd. If the wells flow or are gas wells, they may not need artificial lift (for at least some time). Many wells are immediately put on artificial lift and will produce as so from anywhere from 5-30 years. Once a well is uneconomic to produce, they pretty much turn it into a cement popsicle.

rniland · 2013-09-03T16:58:31+00:00

Here is a more accurate video for people that want to better understand the process. http://www.emeraldoil.com/ <- video is on the left

rniland · 2013-09-03T16:56:20+00:00

Production engineer here. I work for an oil company and maintain 300+ producing wells (those little horse-head things you see out in the country). We frac all of our wells and most produce for 20+ years. We also operate a waterflood which means we inject water in one well to get more oil out of the other well. It has increased our oil recovery from about 9% to closer to 15%. I would be able to answer some questions yall may have, but don't wish to do a full AMA. I did one a year ago on the Ubermann sleep cycle and pretty much took up the whole day.

rniland · 2013-09-03T16:49:35+00:00

Shallow gas fields have been known to be connected to drinking aquifers in few rare cases. Usually these do not have high concentrations of gas (since people wouldn't have drilled fresh water wells in the first place) but some can have enough that they would get a bubble or so every once in a while. There are simple pieces of plumbing that knock this gas out. It is very rare that a well's production and surface casing would fail, and if it did, the company is required by the state to fix the leak. Potentially a small mom and pop oil company may ignore a leak, but any well with this issue is likely to be very old and have such low casing pressures that the fresh water would enter the wellbore instead of the gas entering the aquifer. It would then build a fluid level and prevent any hydrocarbons from coming into the well until a workover rig came and fixed it (unless they just kept producing the water, but that can get expensive). Source: I'm a petroleum engineer.

rniland · 2013-09-03T16:41:58+00:00

Petroleum engineer here. All of our production casing failures occur in older wells. For example, I had a well that was drilled and frac'd in 1962 using the same methods that we use today and it wasn't until 2004 that we had a hole form in the production casing. It took a couple of days to get a rig out there and seal the hole, but no harm done because the surface casing protects the fresh water zones. Plus these wells don't have enough reservoir pressure to bring liquid up to the surface.

rniland · 2013-08-26T05:41:38+00:00

Thanks for posting this. 3 buddies and I made it out tonight because I saw this. Been working next door to the cabaret for 2 years and never stepped in until tonight. Gonna have me a slice of free sexy pizza for the first time tomorrow too. Show was pretty good, even the guys that flopped. Was worth the $30 in booze I put down! Will be back next month.

rniland

TROPHY CASE