In Oil #1, Land as an Oil Hand

That is right my wife and I are in oil country (North Dakota). I have been working on a Workover Rig for about 5 weeks now. Kaaren is working for the Healthy Williston Program and looking forward to coaching basketball. It has taken us a while to get moved in, get familiar with where to shop, get used to a different sleep schedule, and just nest. What brought us here, you may ask? Good down to earth people, the land of our ancestors, a simplicity of life, coming back to our roots, putting the hand to the plow, waiting on the Lord and the peace we had to come here. At times we do feel like we are in a different land and culture. At times I feel like I can relate to Moses, in his father-in-laws' land tending his father-in-laws' sheep.

Life here is different. This area of the country is in a sort of economic boom as there has been lots of oil discovered up here and is being drilled for. Watch this for some historic details http://www.archive.org/details/American1953. One difficulty is that there are not enough people available to fill all the jobs needed here. As the oil industry has boomed out here before and busted there is a lack of confidence that this boom will last. The land out here is vast, fields of grain, cattle, straight roads, big sky, with traces of the older days of homesteading and living off the land, and hundreds of funny looking grasshopper steel contraptions moving up and down (oil pump stations).

These funny looking steel grasshopper contraptions are what my current job pertains to and is what I will try to explain a little bit about. The general idea is that living organisms at one time were covered quickly by water (can we say a world wide flood in the days of Noah!?) and then burried with dirt, which caused them to decay into a black mush that we call crude oil. Today geologoists and sizemicologists study the geography of the land to determine where these pockets of oil MAY be. Brief oil hisotry of the area http://www.willistonnd.com/content.asp?resourceid=74&groupid=10. Once a reasonable GUESS is made the land is prepared for a drilling rig to come set-up and begin drilling. The whole operation involves many people, organizations, regulations and anywhere from 1-30 million dollars to complete. The end result is a well that is free flowing (requires no pump) or pumping well that produces 50-4,000 barrels of oil a day (approx price/barrel presently = $104).

Where the workover rigs, which I work on, come in are when the well is not doing what it is expected to do, and could use a little help. The rig is a large vehicle that carries a telescoping derrick that stands 110 feet up and goes over the well (hole in the ground that is typically 10,000 feet down and is about 8-24 inches wide). There are many things that can be wrong with a well like: something got stuck down the hole, the oil has run out, the pipe is too big, the casing is bad, the oil is stuck in the sediment and not coming out, etc. The gist of what we do is we put different tools in the hole and add tubing (pipe) to it to get it to the depth we want, then we may pump different liquids down the hole or suck them out, or leave the special tool down the hole, take the tubing out and then put a different size or kind of tubing back in the hole and last but not least we put the well back together again and check the flow.