Inside the High-Stakes World of Wireline and Modern Fracking

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We talk a lot about the flow of oil throughout the global oil market, but that macro discussion often obfuscates the work actually happening at the field level and how the job and the industry has evolved over the past few decades. To help us understand more about one aspect of this fieldwork known as wireline, I'm joined today by Andy De La Rosa, AKA Tejano Brown on Twitter.

to discuss how things have changed over the past decade and a half in the industry and how Wireline specifically fits into the U.S. fracking boom. Andy, thanks so much for joining the Oil Ground Up podcast. Hey, how's it going, Rory? It's good to finally... somewhat meet you in person or not in person but at least digitally yeah as i was just saying i feel like we've interacted for years now on on twitter circa x

And yeah, I've learned a lot from you and your videos in particular, explaining how you do what you do in the wireline industry at Underdog Wireline. So I was just hoping to have you onto the show and talk about... what you do, how it fits into the entire US production, oil production system, and kind of all the little bits in between. So before going into all that, just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came into the industry.

So my name is Andy De La Rosa. I'm born and raised here in Midland, Texas, which is right smack in the middle of the Permian Basin. The Permian Basin is obviously well known as one of the most prolific oil and gas producing basins in North America.

See, I've been in the industry for just about 15 years now. All of it is wireline. The way I got into it was I used to do construction. I worked for a mom and pop. glass company and the guy that i actually worked with he went off and he became a packer hand which packers are you know downhole isolation tools in oil and gas and it's kind of burned out called him up one day i was like hey dude i'm kind of wanting to venture out and do something else and

Me personally, I never wanted to be in the oil field. I wanted to stay completely away from it. I mean, it's been in my life, or it's been around my whole entire life. I mean, we live, right? You walk down the street, you see a freaking pump jack.

it's just it's normal for us it's like seeing a tree like if you walk outside for anybody else but um it's crazy because i didn't want to be in it and i told him i was like you know i want to i want to try to get into something else dude i guess oil and gas and he told me he's like you ever heard a wire line or you asked me

i was like no i've never heard of it dude which i didn't know anything about all the guys i mean i was as green as could be and he says oh man it's easy all you're gonna do is just drive a truck and you know i i didn't i didn't like i said i didn't know anything about it i already had my cdl and

I was like, oh, dude, that's easy. I can do that. I haven't driven in a few years, but I can definitely do that. Man, I remember my first day, my first job, I just told myself, what the hell did I get myself into?

For the listeners that aren't aware, because honestly, I would say for most people that follow the industry, some of the actual... Call it, you know, the technicals of how this stuff is actually produced is kind of secondary. It's, you know, once it's produced, it's a barrel in the spreadsheet or it's a barrel on the balance sheet or whatever else. But talk us through what exactly Wireline is.

Okay, so Wireline's been around for a little bit over 100 years. Of course, the Slumberjay Brothers are the ones that patented it. Some of the first fields that were actually Wireline were over in France. I don't know the exact name of it, but... They were just running simple gamma ray logs. I really don't think that there was even casing in the hole with the wells that were drilled. These are obviously shallow wells, so they're just simple.

simple logging tools compared to what we have to this day and age. So over the years, through the introduction of fracking and all that, it became a popularity known for fracking. And I think what a lot of people don't realize is, you know, a lot of people, I guess, especially a lot of.

Guys, you know, on the finance side, they hear fracking or even people that have nothing to do with oil and gas, they hear fracking and they think, you know, they just think, oh, it's fracking. They pump all these, you know, this water and the sand into the earth and it breaks up the rock. But I don't think a lot of people realize is that you're.

missing one key component in it and it's wireline so well with wireline is you it's basically to put to sum it up as easy as possible is you have a truck and on the back end of that truck like like basically like on the truck bed you have this giant reel You could think of it kind of like a yo-yo. But instead of it being yarn, it's going to be like 30,000 to 40,000 feet of steel conductive cable. And that cable on the whip end of it, which is, you know, that's what we call the whip end.

is the beginning of it you'll hoist tools on it it's various tools on the fracking side it's going to be these uh these tools called perforating guns so basically a perforating gun is an explosive it's a shaped charge inside of a barrel And we send these guns down a hole, these perforating guns, and they go to the targeted area of the well. We send an electrical current down the wire line, and it sets the explosives off.

which they shoot out and it penetrates the casing, the cement, and it fractures the rock. So this is the actual fracking portion of fracking. Yeah. So once it fractures that rock... we shoot these guns we pull we hoist those guns right out of the hole this is where i'm talking about like just think of it as a yo-yo so it's hoisting all the way back up to surface so now you have these pennant you have this rock that's that's uh been fractured with the explosives so then

the actual hydraulic fracturing goes in and they start pumping their water their sand and all that and it and it breaks up those fractures even bigger to where it's you know it's it's opening up the whole entire zone i mean that's where you got the whole entire name hydraulic or fracking you know hydraulic fracture and you're fracking that you're fracturing the rock itself

So just so I'm following, so wireline, you detonate and basically create the initial fractures and then your pressure pumping crews, et cetera, will come and actually force. hydraulic fluid and prop end and everything else into those fractures is to widen them out but you got you guys like the tip of the spear if you will of the fact of the fracking process yeah yeah you need it i mean you can you can frack without

wireline i mean you have like sliding sleeves and stuff like that but wireline is it just makes it so much faster it's so much accurate especially like so like in this day and age you know horizontal wells is what you know that's king that's what rules especially here in west texas and stuff so

back in the day and you know there still are some you know producers that drill vertical wells when you're doing a vertical well you only have so much feet of zone that you can play with like maybe 100 200 feet of zone you had to be like precise on that yeah so

With wireline, I mean, you're pretty dang accurate, especially if you're running certain types of tools where you can tie into short joints, which a short joint is just like a smaller piece of casing to where you're able to identify, okay, we set this short joint at 5,000 feet. The wireline tool is picking it up at 5,000 to 5, so we adjust to that. Or they could run even other tools that tie into the perforating guns, which...

They're correlating back to the gamma ray, which the gamma ray is the natural occurring radioactive material. It's the whale's own signature.

all that is is the decay of rock over the course of millions of years so all that rock is going to emit gamma ray and all that has its own signature it almost looks like uh i guess kind of like a heartbeat like on a yeah like an ekg almost whenever you see these these well logs what you're really seeing is is gamma ray logs of some various types right so it's yeah what is it exactly in those logs because that you know

i am not petroleum engineer i'm not a wireline guy i i look at these logs and i see absolutely nothing i'm like oh yes nice nice squiggly line so what is it exactly you're looking for in that you know what what are the attractive zones what are the things to watch out for like explain what you're looking at when you see those logs so there's

various types of logs and in this day and age one of the the most common one is just your your cbo which is a cement bond log and what that is is you're just measuring how good the cement is behind the casing wall so

I think another thing that a lot of people don't realize is whenever you're drilling a well, it's not just one hole with one piece of pipe. It's multiple layers of pipe. So you'll have your surface casing, which will start at surface and go down maybe several hundred feet, maybe a thousand feet or so.

And then in between that, you have your intermediate casing starts off surface and will go another several thousand feet. And then finally, you have your production casing, which will start at surface and it'll go all the way down to TD.

So all three sets of those casings are actually cemented into place. And, you know, that's rules with whatever oil and gas, I guess, regular regulatory system is governing over the state. So like for here in Texas, we have the Texas Railroad Commission, which governs all of that right there. So these EMPs have to provide these logs which show like, hey, this casing is properly cemented in place.

And so once, you know, they drill the wells, they set the casing, they set their seam in and everything, and the drilling rig gets off, they'll have wireline come in and they'll run the CBL. And so what that'll be is, it'll be two tools. which will be your cement bond log tool, and it'll be your gamma ray CCL. The CCL is a casing collar locator, which it's going to be able to tell you every single joint that's connected in the well, the casing and all that. So what it's measuring is...

It's going to measure your depth, which is from surface to however deep they drill the well, how good the semen is behind the casing, the bond, like how good it's sticking to the casing, how good that semen is sticking to formation itself. It's going to tell you every single joint in the well where it can actually connect to the collar of your casing joints.

It's going to measure your gamma ray, which, you know, once again, I said that's, you know, gamma ray occurs naturally over the course of a million years. It's just decaying rockets like thorium, potassium, and uranium that makes up your gamma ray. That's pretty basic right there.

And there's going to be some other things too, which, you know, how fast you're moving the tool, the weight of the tool, how fast like the information is coming back to you, which is we'd be measured by use X and all that. So, but it's, it's basic. It's basic, what's it called?

Sorry, I kind of lost track right there. It's used for measuring semen because, like I said, it's very important to have that semen behind that casing. The whole purpose of that is to protect your water tables and everything. Sorry, continue.

That's the most common log. There's a plethora of all different types of logs that you can run off Wireline. Back in the day, like in the verticals, I was talking about where you only had like one or 200 feet of zones to play with. You would have to run a CNO, which is a compensated neutron log, where you actually had a radioactive source on the bottom of your tool.

And it was telling you porosity and everything behind the, you know, this is shell, this is limestone. Okay. This is just water right here. This is sand and all that. Those are not real. Those aren't as common as it used to be because I mean, In this day and age, everything is copy and paste. These EMPs have gotten so efficient at being able to hit these targeted pay zones and all that to where they don't need to run CNLs because they're like, okay, we drill the well.

a mile down here so we know that this is the targeted zone that we're going to reach again. And the CNL in this case, that would be almost like at the bottom of the wireline, it's almost like an x-ray machine that you're kind of... you know you know taking scans inside the well sending them back up in order to kind of get a better read for where to position but you're saying that that's kind of changed since then we've kind of almost got to this manufacturing model yeah yeah

yes sir so so tell me i think more so how long have you been in this industry for now 15 years uh 15 years total all wireline um yeah uh when i first started um i was an operator for about

two and a half years and they gave me the opportunity to train which i never wanted to be a wireline engineer because i remember just seeing everything and i was like man this is freaking like super crazy it looks stressful just like i didn't think i could do it well i i got lucky i got trained by really good guys and

The opportunity was given to me and I just ran with it. So I trained for about like six months, sent me to school, which honestly was a waste of time. The school that I went to, there are some really good schools that I would love to go to.

Slumber J offers a really good one. Halliburton offered a really good one. One of the best wireline companies that ever exists. Case Hold Solutions offered a really good one, which unfortunately, you know, they don't exist anymore. When I broke out, I went to Pioneer Wireline.

They don't exist anymore either. So I went to school. It was supposed to be about, I think, like a month or two months long. I can't remember. I ended up getting pulled after two weeks because this is when the barrel was actually over $100. So, I mean, we were just... gun ho back here in midland texas my boss called me hey hey you're coming back to midland we got too much work you're good to go i was like all right enough enough learning back to that back to the drilling

Yeah, but the best, honestly, the best way to, don't get me wrong, the schooling is, it's very informative, but the best way to learn is just hands-on from the ground up. You know, I started from the bottom of just being an operator to what I am now, you know, a senior field engineer.

Well, we at Oil Ground Up surely agree with that sentiment. We like everything as granular as possible to build back up the top line view. So, I mean, if you've been in this space 15 years, that's, you know... that's actually longer than i've actually been in the oil industry myself and you've seen a tremendous amount of evolution i imagine not just in

the job itself but the kind of broader oil field service uh industry so talk to me about a little bit about those two things so first you know how has you you mentioned kind of broadly that when you started there may have been more vertical wells versus horizontal now it used to be more bespoke it's now more kind of manufacturing but talk to me about what else has kind of changed in the job and the technology in the day-to-day um over the course of your 15 years

man it's from the time that i started so now it's it's crazy dude like it's just a short amount of time it's it's leaps and bounds so one of the biggest things would be in our perforating gun systems and the way that we're able to um run our wire line so back in the day when i started we had these things called eb perforating which that worked on negative and positive polarities of current and voltage

So you really had to know what the heck you were doing. You would get these guns, you would string them up together. What you're basically doing is you're screwing them in together and you have all these wires sticking out of this port. So you got to attach all these wires, arm it with a detonator, put it in there. I mean, if there's one thing that's wrong.

I mean, the gun is it's it's trash. You go down a hole, you try to shoot it and a gun doesn't fire. That's something that's called a misrun. So now you're having to pull this gun out. You know, you got the. You got the company man pissed off at you. You got Frack pissed off at you. You got all these other service companies pissed off at you because you're like, man.

you know you look like like you don't know what the heck you're doing it it can even get to the point to where if you have too many mess ups on one job hey get your stuff get the heck off my location we'll get somebody else out here that knows what the heck they're doing that's called getting run off i mean that's

It's pretty embarrassing. You could potentially lose your job and stuff like that. With the advancement of perforating guns, they have these things called addressable switches. What that allows us to do is to actually... keep communication with our guns from surface all the way down to bottom so let's say that we that we string a gun together and each one of these guns has its own individual like switch

And in those switches, it has its own IP address, its own processor and all that. Like it's like actually, you know, computer chips in it. It's pretty, it's pretty cool. So we're able to, you know, we could be going down a hole. We could be at say in a lateral well, like 25,000 feet.

And this isn't vertical depth, this is lateral. And all we got to do is press a couple buttons and our screen will pop up and it checks every single gun, green light, green light, green light, green light. Okay, cool. We got communication with all of our guns. So for some reason...

We're coming up and we're shooting. And one of the guns is a communicate. You know, we'll try to recycle inventory inventory to make sure that it's not just, you know, maybe like a little glitch software error or something like that. And if finally it gets to the point where, okay, this gun's not reading, we're able to bypass that gun.

and just start shooting, you know, the other ones above it. Back in the day with the EB Perfect, you couldn't do that. Like I said, if one gun didn't shoot, that whole string is done. Like you got to come out of the hole. So that, that really helps out a lot. It also helps out too with, you know, like with oil field safety.

oilfield explosive safety which is rp67 and just being able to to read all of our guns and everything like we have a lot of customers especially now in this day and age um that's all we're allowed to run like we're not allowed to run any of the old school stuff like that because hey this is it's basically outdated technology this is what we need to run because it's following you know the guidelines of not only our sop but jall's sop but rp67 and stuff

Another huge advancement too is the wireline they run itself. So back in the day, which is still very commonly used, the steel wireline, the cable, it was just steel cable. So now with pump down operations, you have something that's called greaseless wireline.

So when I say greaseless, whenever to be able to control your wellbore pressure from escaping from our pressure control, when we stab onto wells, we'd have to actually pump this type of grease so that grease would keep pressure inside the well. from escaping and all that it also lubricates our line because you have you know steel on steel that's rubbing and you know obviously it creates friction and all that lubricates the line cools it down and all that stuff

If you didn't know what you're doing, you'd make a pretty big mess. And nine times out of 10, you're going to make a pretty big mess. I mean, you're flinging grease all over the location. It's covering frack pumps. It's covering your wireline truck. It's covering cover man's truck. Cover man's coming to your...

to your wire line, like, hey, man, you owe me a freaking car wash or something like that. So with greaseless wire line, what it is, it's still steel cable, but that steel cable, it's on the outside of that steel cable, you have a polymer jacket. So it's like just this black jacket.

And what that does is it's able to, the tensile strength, we can't pull out a rope socket. So pulling out a rope socket means it's like the tools actually come detached from the wireline. You leave tools down hole, which, you know, that's a... It's a pretty big mess up right there. Yeah, it's a big problem. So it has a lot of tensile strength. I mean, you can, but if it does happen, it's like some type of freak accident, like something crazy happened.

So it reduces a lot of friction too, especially with these extended laterals.

In this day and age where now people are drilling three, four mile laterals, to be able to pull out a bottom with steel cable, you're creating a lot of friction and you're pulling a lot of weight to the point to where... you're compromising that wire line itself to where you're pulling, you know, 50 to 75% of the breaking strength of that wire line to where, okay, this wire line has so much pull on it now that we can't even, you know.

can't even create communication with the guns because it's inside of that cable you have conductive copper wire which that's how the electricity is able to pass. So or, you know, you could be pulling so much that you actually rip out a rope socket because you just it's it's not able to handle these, you know, these long laterals and all that stuff. Wireline was never designed for horizontal wheels. You know, this it just it just happened to come onto the scene and everything.

um with the the advantages with that greaseless cable is you know you're able to pull like say if um okay a very good example and this is really really you know high weight that i was pulling so i was on a well one time

And the well was like 20,000 feet. And this isn't, like I said, this isn't true vertical depth. And I was running a conventional cable. The way that this well was drilled, there was actually a lot of dog legs in it. And, you know, it's just kind of like the well goes up and down, almost like a little roller coaster in the ladder.

that's what we call dog legs and stuff so when i started pulling from bottom and this is you know measured depth is 20 000 feet i was pulling almost 5 000 pounds and breaking strength for the cable that we run is 10 000 so i was already almost pulling 50 000 or not 50 000 i mean 50 of the breaking strength which i mean i'm compromising that wireline right there like that's it's like hey man this drum is freaking worthless you know

You know, we got out of the hole and, you know, we have to actually take it to a shop and get it inspected and all that. So same thing, same, same depth, different well. Grease this wire line. I'm only pulling. maybe 2 000 pounds which is oh wow i mean that's light and then i can you know i can rip this gun out of the hole we put this because there's there's less pull on it we don't have to worry about stuff that's called like a high strand or a bird cage and so with wireline

You have two sets of armors. You have your outer layer and your inner layer. Your outer layer of the cable we run, you have 18 individual strands that spin one way. Inside of that, you have 12 individual strands that spin the other way. So each one of those has an individual strand. So over time, your wireline does, you know, it's introduced into, you know, corrosive material from in the wellbore. So it starts to deteriorate and all that and armors can break.

And necessarily what happens is when you're going down hole and your pressure control, that birdcage, a single strand will just like tangle up and then you're stuck. I mean, there's a whole entire process you got to do to be able to fix it. So grease this wire line.

it's pretty much eliminated that whole entire, you know, this happened. That's probably the one thing that scares me more than anything is a high strand. Yeah. But with, you know, with greaseless, it's, you know, it's, you don't really, you don't have to worry about it. You can actually. mess up the outer polymer jacket, but that's if you're not, you know, you're not taking care of the line itself. You're not running it the way it should be ran. We'll be back after this short break.

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Actually, so you had mentioned that Wireline was not initially obviously designed for horizontal drilling. And this is likely a deep admittance of my own kind of desk jockey status. How does that work? You can conceptually, like logically, like you lower it down a vertical. Well, OK, that makes sense. But if you're lowering it down and then the horizontal is in some cases, many cases longer than the vertical itself.

How are you, how is that working? Like, how are you getting the pressure and the kind of like turning force to like get that thing down there? I understand with like a... like a horizontal drill you have you can almost pull itself along as it's going but wireline the holes already drilled how are you pushing it through there and kind of controlling it in that way

okay so one of the most the biggest things to be we this is what we call pumping tools down pumping guns down one of the biggest things that you need the most important thing is fluid displacement so you have a well whenever you perforate you're creating you know you're connecting your well to your reservoir you're you're able to

to move fluid so if if you if you don't have that fluid is not going to be able to move you can't you can't send fluid down hole you can't send profit down hole the well is just going to pressure out whenever you start doing your your hydraulic pressure pumping yeah so The biggest thing is you need fluid displacement. You need somewhere for that fluid to go. So when the well, we have this, we have the well schematic and we have this little chart. It's called kickoff point.

You're 30, you're 60, and you're 90, which I would say that 30, 60, 90 is pretty self-explanatory because, you know, that's when the well actually goes 90 degrees. It's your lateral well. So the kickoff point, which we call our KOP, is when the well starts to deviate whenever.

Because a vertical well, it's truly not vertical. When you actually run some type of inclination tool, you're going to see that it changes degrees like 0, 10, 13, and back to 0. It's never truly vertical. It's just moving all over the place. So once you get to the point to where it's really starting to deviate, that's your kickoff point. So they'll usually run two pumps on surface, which is basically just frack pumps. And what they're doing is they're pulling water from water tanks.

And they just start pumping fluid on top of your gun. And that's literally pushing your gun, your gun string, your tools into the well. So like once I get to my kickoff point, you know, I'll get on my radio, which I actually have a video I posted on not too long ago.

And actually on that, I would encourage all listeners to go check out Andy's videos on on X because they are truly educational and deeply entertaining. I find that both you obviously know you're talking about. And I think being able to talk about it in like a.

in a way that i think is approachable for people is like quite a skill actually so as a kudos on those videos they're really really good i appreciate a lot so you know i'll get on the radio once you get to that kickoff point and i'll be like hey give me four barrels okay so they're pumping four barrels a minute on top of me And so what I'm doing is I'm watching my tension, which is my weight, and I'm maintaining a happy medium on my tension and my speed.

I don't want to go too fast because then I'm feeding wire line in. I don't want to go too slow because I'm holding too much back. And what can end up actually happening is I get ripped out of rope socket because they're pressure pumping on top of my tool.

so i'll get to another once i'm past my kickoff point maybe i get like right before 30 degrees hey bring me up to eight i'm like i always try to get full rate before i'm at 60 degrees so i'm you know i'm just watching my attention i'm watching my speed i'm watching my depth okay give me 12. okay let's go 16 and usually my max i usually do it by 18 20 depending on what type of plug because you got what's really what's helping pull that what's helping push that tool down

It's going to be the bottom, your BHA, your bottom hole assembly, which is, you know, your frack plug and all that. And some of these plugs are designed to make these tools freaking fly. And the whole purpose of that is, you know, you're saving time.

and most importantly you're saving you're saving water because i mean i've had i've had some pump down some tools where we waste you know over 2 000 barrels and i have some where like we're saying we're running like a well boss plug which is in my honest opinion the best frack plug on the market you know it could be this it could be the same length of lateral where i waste you know over 2 000 barrels of water i may

only use maybe 500 barrels of water. So, I mean, cost efficiency is everything, especially in this day and age and especially, you know, how the market is right now. I'm going to get you there in a second. So I want a couple more technical questions. Then we're going to talk about the market too. So yeah, that's just, that's it. Like, you know, I try to get full rate and it just, I'm just, like I said, I'm watching my speed, watching my attention and I'm just, I'm just.

I'm keeping a happy medium. I'm using my control panel to get there. And once I get to the area to where we're going to either, or I get to the spot to where we're going to start perforating our guns. I'm back on the radio, and I'm like, hey, we got 1,000 feet. We got 500 feet. And always my last warning is we got 200 feet. Stand by. Once I get to that death row, I'm shut down. I'm just shut down, shut down, shut down. I'm telling the pump operator, hey, kill the pumps. Shut it down.

you know, and I just, I just don't hit the brake because if you just hit the brake, your tools, your tools are going to, you could rip off because you still have residual fluid that's moving. So once I tell them shut down, you know, I'm tightening it up a little bit, you know, slowing it down just a little. And then once I see my weight, my tension just drop off. Then boom, I hit my brake, lift up and start pulling my guns up to the depth where we need to be able to start perforating.

So in the videos that you share that you're sitting in, I'll call it the cockpit of what looks kind of like, I'm assuming you're in your truck, you're in the kind of control room managing this process. Is that what you're generally doing when you're in that truck? So you're kind of...

sitting there kind of managing the descent of the line, the pressure on the back of the line, and then essentially deciding when at those various stages to actually kind of blow your guns, shoot your guns. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just, you know, I call it the shooter's cap or the logging cap. Okay.

so it's it's the inside of the wireline truck you know and i'm just like i said i'm keeping communication with the pump operator i'm making sure that i'm paying attention to you know once again my speed my tension everything you you gotta you really just gotta be paying attention you just can't you know lollygagging because i mean

Something could happen and you could actually like, if they didn't get a good flush after the frack, you could hit a sand plug, you could hit a gel plug, you could preset the plug, you could be overfeeding line. And there's actually people that have over...

fed wire line to where it passes their tool string and it wraps around the gun or they even tie a knot into the wire line which is that's a huge mess up for you know if i'm not also i'm not paying attention i could rip out a rope socket or even you know the pump operator could not be paying attention or

i mean this happens all the time you know i'm pumping down and i'll see i'll see something that'll happen like my attention would just like drop off pretty fast i'm like hey hey you know pump down what's going on oh we just lost a pump and i was like okay you know well hey let's shut it down and you know away from the fix the pump or start all over or like another really good example how this has happened several times to me so they didn't get a good they didn't get a good flush after the frack

And what does that mean? Just elaborate a little bit. What does the flush mean in this context? So basically, like after they're done fracking, you know, they have all the profit down hole. They're going to they're going to basically.

Basically what it means, to put it in the most easiest term, they're flushing the well to make sure it's clean. They're moving all that sand to make sure that there's nothing that's going to be in the way of whenever I'm sending tools down a hole that could get me stuck or anything like that. So they didn't get a good flush.

So the, uh, the perfs, the fractures are still kind of, you know, they're clogged up a little bit. So once we start, and I'll be able to tell right away, once we start pumping down, my pressure will be way higher than what it normally is. I'm like, okay.

and i remember i was pumping down and i was already and i was already like maybe like a thousand feet into the lateral and pressure was like you know like like nine thousand i was like man i was like man they did not get a good flush at all and we're

We're pumping like maybe 18 barrels a minute and all of a sudden, you know, those perforations that are kind of clogged give way because you have fluid that's moving. So they give way. Once it gives way, all that fluid is going to rush into those purse and pressure is going to drop.

substantially so it went from like 9 000 to like 7 000 just like like that and when that happened like when that happened it sensed my tools blind so i may be going like i was going maybe like 300 foot a minute and with that substantial

decrease in pressure i skyrocketed up to a thousand foot a minute and i just had to open up my control valve which controls my speed and i'm literally on the radio shut down shut like screaming on the radio shut down shut down just to kind of get control of everything again So that's happened more than once. I mean, I'm not the only person it's happened to, that's for sure. Yeah.

So on that, I mean, we talked kind of about how the job itself has changed. Let's talk for a second about the industry, the kind of broader wireline industry and kind of where it fits into the kind of. uh kind of larger oil field service sector so that's obviously something over 15 years again that has seen

Tremendous evolution and change. You mentioned, I mean, you already mentioned the companies at the beginning. You're like, oh, this one, oh, it doesn't exist anymore. Oh, this one, oh, it doesn't exist anymore. But obviously, Underdog Wireline, the company you work with, is new. So like, how has this changed? How has the industry evolved? Has it been? I mean, one of the things we've heard.

Kind of across much of the industry in other sectors is the kind of march towards consolidation. Have we seen something similar in Wireline or does it remain kind of more a fractured industry? Talk to me about what the industry itself looks like and what you and your competitors. kind of are doing day to day versus each other.

Yeah. So M&A is everywhere, especially on oil field service side. So I said, OK, this company doesn't exist anymore. So the company that I started Wireline at was called Superior Well Services. And right before I left, they had got bought out or I guess merged with with neighbors. And then eventually they ended up merging with CNJ. And then eventually they ended up merging with.

with keen and they became next tier and that's just everywhere consolidation like one of the ones that really that caught me by surprise was ranger came in and they bought several wireline companies it was patriot perfects and um pentel and i want to say one more and you know they ended up just becoming rangers so with that they weren't just wireline they added like

all types of different service sites. They had reverse units, work over rigs, wire line, plug and abandonment, pressure pumping. Same thing with next tier.

wire line i mean just basically what i just said they have all that too i'm not sure if they have i'm not sure if they have drilling but i mean they they pretty much have everything if i'm not mistaken maybe drilling i don't think they do but with us um we've underdog actually started in 2013 and it started off as a Reynolds company and it's um it's as mom and pop as it gets so my uh my boss it's actually him and his wife and his wife's parents that started it

start off as a rental company all they did was just the light towers um shower trailers cool down trailers stuff like that and then they ended up adding lay down machines so at about 2018 he uh He bought a single wireline truck from an old wireline company, which doesn't exist to nobody's surprise, called Great Wireline. I remember hearing a story that when they bought it, they didn't even know if they'd be able to make it back home or not.

Start off with one truck. They were approached by several people. They were like, oh, we need to get five trucks or three trucks right off the bat. And they didn't want to go with that business plan. Like, hey, we'll just start with one truck. So when I went on there, we had one truck.

And then we got two and then we got three. COVID hit, you know, and we were three trucks. It was it was really hairy there for a good while. I'd be walking into the shop and I'd be like, man, this is the day that we're shutting the doors. But now they.

They kept us on. They didn't lay anybody off. They actually fired people because they were just doing stuff they weren't supposed to be doing, but he never laid anybody off. Of course, we took pay cuts, which, you know, once the market picked back up, we got all our pay cuts back and stuff. But I've seen this company go from one truck.

to we're now at nine operational so we have wire line we have rentals we have laid down machines we've also added um uh there's also you know there's different types of wireline we've added sick line and we've got a braided line braided lines for fishing sick liners You could fish with slick line, but it's more on the production side of things. This company has grown substantially. We're still independently owned. We don't have no private equity or anything like that.

my boss his wife and his in-laws that are doing it and we went from like i think i was employee number two or three i think i want to say three i think we're upwards of like 50 or 60 employees very very cool yeah we need and um what's crazy is especially with how the market is we're just getting busier and busier like we can't handle the workload that we're at right now we we need probably at least two or three more trucks added into our inventory so i think that's actually a good

pivot point to kind of talking at the market for a second here. And I think I think there's always this question of, you know, what. the market is talking about. And then I think there's a different kind of transition here about what people that work in the industries that support the market or produce and supply the market are thinking. I think Midland is obviously kind of ground zero.

this stateside. So what are people talking about right now? Like, what is the what's the tone? What's the sentiment, you know, at the field at the site or in the company? Like, how are people talking about this market in your mind? Right now, I think there's just, I guess from my point of view, there's really a lot of uncertainty of what's going to go on because, I mean, it's crazy. Of course, I pay attention to a lot of stuff, especially like you or Sayo.

what's his name he's a real prominent uh josh what's josh's last name josh young he runs the josh young yeah so i paid attention to a lot of guys like that and you know i see i was supposed to lie what trips me out is like

It seems like the market doesn't really react to what it normally would like back in the day, like especially, you know, geopolitical risk or even, you know, during the Biden administration, just OPEC cutting, you know, millions and millions of barrels. It was figured it would react a lot.

more positive with what they're doing because they're hindering production and all that. But here at Midland, I think people are just more uncertain, but they're just kind of going with the flow because of the last downturn. Not COVID, but the 2015 downturn, we were still pretty busy. And I mean, the barrel got, I think it got to $26 WTI. But then it kind of just like leveled out around like...

I would say the high 30, mid 40s range, but people were still really busy. But I think the problem with that is that a lot of people were just burning through capital. They really weren't returning to investors. They were just drilling with what they could because, hey.

everything is obviously it's a lot cheaper to run these services than what it is would it be at like 70 80 or 90 a barrel and everything so the one of the things that that is the biggest concern for me is the M&A and because you know you have Obviously, you have Diamondback and then you have XTO, which they own the most acreage in the Permian. A lot of these smaller companies, they're being swallowed up by these guys, which it's not bad. Kudos to Diamondback.

into Exxon or XTO. I mean, they're, they're great customers to work for, but it's like, it's almost sort of a sense, like if you don't have these guys to be able to work for, you're kind of screwed in a way because.

It's like, you know, who are you going to go work for? Because everyone's knocking on the same door. Everyone's trying to get the same piece of pie. And with that, you know, you have a lot of companies that are that are underbidding that are cutting each other's throats. Oh, you'll do it for.

you do it for 3 000 a stage oh we'll do it for 1500 a stage or something like that and it's like you know how are you guys able to make money how are you able to to even you know to get anything rolling with whenever you're doing all this and with that you know you're setting whenever people

They're coming in and they're underbidding and they're coming in with their lower prices. They're setting a new market price for all these wireline companies and you'll have someone that come in. It's like, oh, no, you guys are too expensive. These guys will do it for this month.

But then, you know, also at the same time, you get what you pay for just because they're doing it for $1,500 doesn't mean that they're going to be, you know, they're going to be good at all. I mean, it's an interesting point, too, right? That. I think when we talk about, let's say, a company will produce, let's say, a barrel of crude for $30 versus $50 versus $70. Theoretically, as a commodity, all those barrels of crude are the same. But I think, to your point, services...

aren't commodities and you have a vastly different kind of quality of deliverable between something that could cost different amounts of money. It's not the same kind of commoditized product as, say, the actual barrel. that the company is looking to produce i think the other thing that i'm curious about here is so you had mentioned that you guys are still very very busy uh kind of you know almost need more capacity to keep up with all the demand at the same time

prices, WTI kind of mid 50s right now on a WTI basis. We keep hearing that the U.S. oil patch and particularly the Permian Basin no longer really at least full bore works. on a growth basis at these prices, and everyone, myself included, are expecting... a plateau or a rollover here. But obviously, there's still a tremendous amount of demand for services companies, even to keep output flat, given the kind of constant treadmill of shale.

I think the two questions are like, one, have you guys seen how have you seen demand for your services evolve? Kind of, you know, let's even say over the past couple of years. And then the second question is.

on the pricing side you mentioned that there's always you know the competitive pressure for others to kind of undercut one another or kind of underbid to get the job um but i think the other thing you've you've seen historically i mean i remember back in the 2014 to 2016 crash um one of the big stories was that you know you saw costs uh you know break-even costs plummet over that period both as the emps themselves for the first time really for many of them needed actually

tighten belt and kind of cut the fat and figure out, you know, how to do this for cheaper because they never had the cost pressure prior. But one of the stories was that they put tremendous downward pressure on the cost of oil field services because. They functionally kind of have, you know, they have the buying pressure for the services side. But I think now there's this question of like, can that get pushed down any further? Because while you already got kind of pushed down and.

through 2016 and then again through 2020, like is there, how much flex is there right now in what you're seeing in kind of bid prices for these services?

And how does that kind of work out? So yeah, so two questions. One, on the demand side, how is that kind of modular over the past couple of years? And the pricing side, are you still seeing, is it pressure coming down from the EMPs or is it more pressure coming kind of?

orthogonally from you know competitors to kind of say like we're going to underbid you for the same job yeah so on the demand side what really helps what really helps us out a lot is you know we don't have our eggs in one basket so you know obviously

When you come to the premium basin with these oil field service companies or these EMPs are drilling horizontal wells or fracking. So you have these wireline companies and, you know, their main focus is pump down perforating. So that's what their, you know, their whole entire.

workforce is geared to do so when a crash happens which it's inevitable it's going to happen there's no drilling there's no fracking so these companies they're the ones they're the first to go the ones that just focus primarily on horizontal perforating so it helps us out a lot and there are several other wireline companies that you know that have the same game game plan we are driven on what you would call remedial or day work you know some sort of sense like the work that

the bigger companies they want nothing to do with but at the end of the day it's what's going to help you survive it's what's going to help you you know keep your company afloat and everything and what is that can you expand a little bit on what the difference between that is versus what what the other companies what type of work the other company

would be going for so it's going to be on your production side of things just to be able to you know be able to have the well still producing so you can go in and okay we'll go on a work over rig and they want to re-perforate one zone so we'll shoot maybe one or two guns or

They want to plug and abandon a well, so we'll go and we'll set a plug and we'll dump semen above it. Okay, hey, we want to do a squeeze job. We need you guys to come run with a very small gun, which is just a squeeze gun, or we're going to do some tubing punches. They call it, forgive me for saying this, they call it shit work. But that's the work that will...

that will help you survive in the long run. Whenever everything hits, you know, whenever the crash has happened, that work's still going to be going on. It's not going to be as much as what it is right now, but it's still going to be happening. You know, like...

We have one customer where we follow a cold soothing unit. These guys are just setting packers left and right. And man, they're making some pretty dang good money. And it's not fracking. It's just all production work. So we have a really high demand for that.

what's really helped us out too is service quality. Service quality is 100%. It's how good your equipment is, how good your people are, your workforce, all that stuff like that. So you can have the best equipment in the world, but if you have people out there that just don't give a crap.

then what's the point of having the best equipment in the world if they can't even run it the right way to be able to maintain, you know, your reputation, to be able to make sure that we're keeping these customers happy or even, you know, continue to do work for them. So thank God we have a good set of guys.

We have good management. They have an awesome game plan, very methodical in how they do things, especially our district manager. So service quality is real big, which has helped us increase demand. And that's why we're having to get more trucks like this last week. just i went and i shot toes for a brand new customer that we've never done work for i was out there thankfully we you know we did a good job and we're going to be getting a call back from these guys so on the um

The other question you're asking me, we're seeing it from both sides. We're seeing it from EMPs. Like I said, when I said earlier that everyone's knocking on the same door trying to get the same piece of pie, we do have some EMPs where we are doing horizontal perforating. well, hey, these guys are coming in and they're bidding at this price. So, you know, then we have to lower our stage price to whatever, you know, basically to match them or just to be fair in their eyes.

you know it's also coming from other people's sides you know like because these these sales people they talk to each other like a wireline companies you know like oh you know they'll try to you know they'll throw little hints out there or whatever you know just kind of like

almost like, you know, Hey, we don't want to go under this price or, you know, what's your ballpark range. But it's, it's all, you know, these, these guys are just, they're, they're trying to get like an upper hand on each other too, at the same time. So they, they can get the work themselves, but it's, I mean, people are going to,

The thing that really bothers me, and there are some companies that still practice this, and I hope that people don't take this the wrong way, but loyalty in the oil field, especially with DMP companies and service quality or service companies. I mean, not service quality, but service companies.

it's really non-existent anymore because like you know back in the day you know before this whole entire horizontal boom they said you had just like just joe schmo freaking emp oil producers and they used freaking joe schmo wireline and they've been using them for 10 years is because they develop a relationship with them they know they know how they work they know their price range they work with them on on every single level that does you know that's pretty much non-existent anymore emps

the biggest thing is cost efficiency that's what they're looking for who can do this you know for the cheapest but also you know the best quality work at the same time well i think that's You know, it was kind of as I was saying earlier, this idea that, you know, it's difficult to get a truly.

commoditized service in these ways so that when everything just becomes a kind of a lowest bidder, kind of almost an open marketplace, you know, that these are all equal, you know, and undifferentiatable kind of widgets that kind of trade back and forth.

Do you guys see any benefit in kind of trying to maintain that kind of... more loyalty like would you guys take uh like a loss making job for a long time client on the down in order to kind of maintain a kind of a longer term relationship when again

The crash is inevitable, as is the subsequent kind of rebound on the other side. That's the beauty of this market is anytime we go really high or really low, we know that the opposite is eventually going to come around the corner. So is there any kind of longer term thinking like that?

kind of the the firm level yeah we've definitely taken you know we've taken some losses to be able to like okay you know hey we'll eat this cost because we know that in the long run we're going to be working for you guys we know that you guys you know you're one of the few that do show

loyalty as long as we provide the service quality as long as we stay in the range of price and everything that's gonna you know gonna be happy with you guys and all that stuff it's i mean we're not the only ones everybody does it and and sometimes people do it Sometimes EMPs will take advantage of that, and they'll be like, well, hey, man, if you do this, then it's like, oh, well, I guess so, you know? So it's good and bad. And I think the other thing here is I think, so...

I just, again, I'm encouraging everyone that listens to the podcast to come check out your Twitter or your X account, which is Tijano Brown, at Tijano Brown. And I want to ask, actually, I mean... you are and the reason i'm having on the podcast is like you're you're the main Wireline guy I know. I mean, you talk about this industry all the time, you're educating about it, you're engaging and shitposting in your own way. We're all trying to maintain our sanity in this crazy market. How's that?

kind of turned into, like, have you been able, again, in terms of differentiating what has increasingly attempted to be a commoditized market, like, do you guys get any business leads from your social media activity as well? Yes. Yeah. Oh, good. Okay. I was wondering, and I can't imagine because I mean, you're just shy of 14,000 followers, which is a very impressive following for.

wireline which again very few people know what it actually is so you are like the main you're the initial exposure you're the educator and then you can service the ultimate demand when they're like oh wow i want to i want to frackle well let's get let's get andy on the phone

Yeah, it's crazy, dude. So, you know, I have helped. I have helped, you know, a few times, you know, you know, guys have reached out to me and I've introduced them to my bosses or a sales guy. So because of the following that I gained on Twitter.

um the idea has already been floated out there several times that they want to pull me off of a truck and make me sales and you know once again like within this past month um how's i forward so that new customer that that i did work for was actually came from me i gave it to my sales guy you know obviously he you know he

he finalized the sale and all that. I just gave him the lead and all that. So I gave him another lead and I told my boss, I was like, Hey man, I'll just, I'll just keep getting the leads and I'll give them to our sales guy and he can just finalize the deal or whatever. And he goes, I need you off of a truck. He's like, you need to get off a truck. You need to come sail. And I would like to. And I think I would do fairly well. But right now, just the timing isn't right for me. And honestly, I...

I probably would never get off a truck. I'm probably going to be 80 years old pumping guns down. For what I spent a decade in sales before getting into this wild and crazy world of oil analytics. And I think you'd make an excellent salesperson. But to your point, I also think that part of your.

Part of your image, I think, on Twitter is like a guy that's actually on. I mean, it's the videos that you're actually like literally on the field. You're doing the work. And again, it's wild to see the scale of some of the stuff that you're working with. It's very, very cool to see.

Yeah, I've been approached before by people in the field that are like, hey, are you, you know, Tohono Brown? I'm like, yeah, I'm him. And it's pretty cool, you know, when people do come up to, you know, we've hired a lot of new hands because like I said, we've been having to, you know. keep up demand on our side so we have we've been hiring so much that i've had two people that came up to me recently and like dude like i

I was like, the first time I ever saw, you know, about this, it was because of you. And I was like, man, that's, I was like, you know, it makes me feel pretty, it makes me feel pretty good and stuff. So, I mean, I like it a lot. And honestly, like my Twitter, my Twitter timeline, it's just like, it's basically like, just an...

open diary and sometimes you know i'll post stuff and i'll delete it i was like yeah i gotta delete that but then i'll you know i'll stray i'll stray away from you know wireline and i'll just post like all these random things but my mind is just it's always going a million miles per hour and

It's a good thing and it's a bad thing, but I really love what I do and I really love to educate. And I would have never thought in a million years that... that that i would be you know my twitter account would be where it is because i never made it for this purpose at all like no i made it to keep up to keep up with mma to keep up with music and then

The way I even stumbled on the whole entire Energy Twitter was because of Colin McClellan, which is Frack Slap. He's from Midland. We used to wireline together. We were on the same crew together. I've known him since I was a kid. i just started you know seeing everyone i was like man this is freaking awesome like i can't believe everyone loves oil and gas this much so i just you know i just took off with it and i've um

I've had a really good time and I hope the community continues to grow. I hope it continues to stay the way that it is. I've learned a lot. I didn't know anything about the whole market side of it.

I'm still pretty dumb when it comes to that, but I've learned something to where I can actually explain it to some of my friends about... price commodity or just anything in those you know sense of terms on the finance side and it makes me feel a little bit smarter than what i am because i think i'm god i always say this i think i'm just a dumb field hand

I would disagree with that. But as someone who has also, I think, learned the vast majority of what I know about the oil and gas sector from Twitter over the past 15 or so years as well, I think it's an invaluable research tool, educational tool. And I also think that, you know, we always talk in this sector about energy ignorance, right? And I think that education is the only kind of solution to that. So I think people like yourself that are not just knowledgeable, but also personal about it.

are kind of critical to this educational journey for the industry as it tries to kind of correct the record on this stuff. The last question I'm going to ask you, and just because I have to ask you in this context, see, because we're talking about... educating and dispelling ignorance, there's a new television show out. over the last year that you really, really enjoy shitposting about called Landman with Billy Bob Thornton as your kind of crusty landman. And again, I mean, it's kind of...

even just tangentially about the oil field, half the episodes. But like from what you've seen, what are the, what's the kind of top thing that you see it gets right? And what are the kind of top one or two things that you think it gets ass backwards wrong? Okay, so I'm gonna be honest with you. I have not watched any of that show. Okay. None of it. Okay. So, okay. You've seen the clips, right? I've seen one clip.

one clip and it's where billy ball thornton is like standing in a field with a bunch of windmills and he's talking about you know this and that so i will give credit where credit is due in that clip where he's talking about you know you To be able to even have this whole entire push for the green movement, it requires fossil fuels. To be able to industrialize that whole entire industry, it...

You need hydrocarbons to be able to do it all. It's crazy. I don't understand how people don't understand that, especially people that really push for eliminating fossil fuels, which is retarded. Like I said, I'll give Clay where credit's due, and he's 100% right on that scale. But... I can only talk about what I've heard from my friends. And it's just like, oh, man, they do this right. They do that wrong. But I'm just so critical on it. And honestly, it's not that.

I'll probably eventually watch it. Maybe someday, but I honestly don't have any time to just sit down and watch TV, dude. But it's gotten to the point now to where I just do it for fun because I think it's funny to me to talk crap about it.

And I like to, I like to ruffle feathers on Twitter. It's just, it's, it's all entertaining. When I, whenever I do my, my non oil filled or even the oil filled, but when I do, I guess what you call shit posts, it's purely for my own entertainment. So I can laugh. That's, that's all it's for.

good good i mean i mean i consider i watch with my wife every week and it's uh i would consider it our guiltiest pleasure because i mean it's not always fantastic but it is guilty and i think it's it's my version of like the oil desperate housewives is kind of how i think of it um yeah but anyways uh before you know before we let you go

Any kind of final comments, things that people should watch out for in areas that people should find you? No, I just, you know, I do have, you know, the forms of social media, but the only place I'd like to... talk or even sharing my information is of course his twitter so if you guys are interested in checking me out or even checking out underdogwireline just donald browns t-e-j-a-n-o brown and you'll find me on andy de la rosa just

Just a kid from Midland, Texas trying to find his way. Well, Andy, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it, Ward. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Please do your own research and speak with a licensed financial representative before making any investment decisions.