Oil Drilling Tech

So first you get your shotgun, and then you go hunting for some food, and up from the ground comes a bubbling crude. You know, there are more efficient ways to drill for oil than I don't know. That's pretty efficient. You just have to be insanely lucky. No, that is actually not the way one normally looks for oil or drills for oil um and the process does involve quite a bit of technology. Some of it is fairly simple tech when you look at it from you know, as

far as a sophistication standpoint. But without it we wouldn't be able to get to oil the way we do. Our our society would be completely different. We certainly wouldn't be podcasting right now. Too much of our technology is based off of oil or is powered by stuff that gets his power ultimately through oil. So um, and of

course it's been in the news a lot lately. And yeah, as we've been reading through some of the articles on how Stuff Works dot Com, which I encourage you to do so, especially since Jonathan put all that time into updating some of those. Um, we we were looking at the technology and thinking, you know, this is kind of interesting as a topic that we haven't talked about. I mean, is it's kind of off our normal and beaten path.

But yeah, some of it's pretty amazing how they've they can find oil and then you know the fact that they can even go down as far as they did for the deep Water Horizon, well that was pretty phenomenal

create the well itself. Even though there are problems. We can talk about some of the equipment that they would use yea, and we can talk about why why it was not just the fact that you know, the blowout was a huge problem with the deep Water Horizon, but also why it's a problem that, uh, like, why couldn't they fix that as opposed to being able to fix it on in other situations. We'll get into that UM.

Once we get under pressure, do do UM. So starting off, let's talk about how you would find oil before you

even start drilling UM. Now, in the olden days, way back when people were first starting to drill for oil, you pretty much had to look around and really observe the geographic features of the region you were in and really needed the help of the geologists, someone who was who was learned in the ways of things like rock formations, just the kinds of rocks that were in the region, because you need to look for specifics sort of rocks and soil that would be indicative that there, at least

is the potential for oil to be present. Right, Well, you still need geologists, Oh yeah, you don't. They're definitely a very important part of finding oil. It's just that now they have more tools at their disposal than just their eyes. That's true, because they're using they basically look for changes in the Earth's gravitational field that can indicate that there's oil nearby. That's that's one of the methods. Yeah. Really, what they're what they're trying to do is they're looking

for oil flows. Now, when I say looking. Obviously they can't see the oil because it's it's underground or underwater, well at least not in most cases. Yeah, if you can see the oil, you really don't need your geologists there. I mean, there are there are things like you know, oil sands, when there's a lot more obvious that there is oil present. But in those cases you can't, you know, just slurp it up. There's a lot of work to be done. And we're not we didn't really at least

I didn't prepare for that particular topic. But yeah, and in those cases you can actually see that there is petroleum, and I'm I would imagine, um, just a guess, you could probably smell it too. Actually, they geologists might use sniffers, which are electronic sensors that can detect the presence of oil, so they could they could smell for it. They could use the gravitational sensors that the PLTT was talking about.

They could also use uh magnetic sensors to detect changes in the Earth's magnetic field, which would be the result of oil flowing sometimes uh several thousand feet below the surface of the Earth. And then one of the most common ways is they create vibrations in the earth and then listen for the It's kind of like an echo. You're listening for the reflection of the vibration you've sent into the earth to detect what kind of rock is beneath you. So you are essentially thumping the earth and

listening to hear what kind of thing. Yeah, you're It's like when you pick up a melon and you thump it to see if it's right to eat, except in this case, you're thumping the earth to see if there's any oil down there. And uh. And when I say thumping, sometimes literally they are thumping the earth, except they're doing it with a massive truck, a thumber truck. A thumber truck. Yes, I think I had one of those drive down my

street the other day. Yeah. I actually call them flower and they tell me that he can call me flower if he wants to. It's a thumber truck. Anyway, Thumper was a rabbit, that's true. Well, I'll screw up my own joke. That's okay. Somebody will write in ye and like, listen, I'm a Bambi enthusiast, and let me tell you so. Anyway, the Thumber nice, the thumper truck has these big heavy plates that they will raise and lower against the ground.

They hit the ground really hard, and then you have microphones, very sensitive microphones set up around the area around the region to detect the vibrations, and based upon the quality of those vibrations, you can tell whether or not there's oil flowing underneath the surface. Um. There's also they could also use explosives to do the same thing. So you could dig a hole and put some explosives in or in the case of if you're if you're trying to search for oil in the water, you may throw explosives

over the side of the boat. Um. Not recommended. And there are other ways to to get the same effect. Well, there's the compressed air gun, yes, which is much safer. Yeah, you can use a compressed air gun. You fire compressed air at the ground and that creates the the vibration you need to you know, then you listen to her if there's the correct frequency that would indicate that there's oil beneath the ground. Yeah. And actually, uh, I sort of sort of misspoke when I said that we really

haven't talked about this kind of thing before. Because Boyle has made a cameo appearance in another recent podcast, auto tune because some of them, right, the audio technology that they use, that's what ye. The founder of auto tune originally was a geologist who worked on this kind of technology, yep, And that that technology evolved and got used for the sound correcting gizmo that we all know and a lot

of people don't love. Right. So, if you've listened to auto tune, the news is version of double Rainbow, which is phenomenal. By the way, you two are experiencing the joy of the technology that can help you find oil in a really twisted way. So but say they find oil, all right, they found oil. Now now comes the point where they have to start drilling down so they can get to the oil. Uh. And drilling is a very

involved process. The first thing they have to do they have to, assuming that it's land based, clear the land and they have to level it off so that they can build an oil rig to to start drilling. Um, they have to have water in the trilling process. Actually, water is very important. They use water to mix with dirt to create mud. They use the mud to help pump or really to push the the the rock that gets broken up as the drill is drilling down into

the earth. So uh, they essentially are pumping mud down into the hole to help clear the rock out of the way as the drill drills down. Um, So you've gotta have a water supply, So either you need water in near buy or if there's not any water, you need to drill the water well. But you have to have water to to two for this process. The water

based rigs don't have this problem. Now there's there's usually quite a lot of water in the offshore drilling, yes, process, but on land, the crew does need to dig a reserve pit which they used to get rid of the rock cuttings and some of the mud. Um. They line it with plastic, you know, in an attempt to protect the environment, you don't want anything leaching into the water supply of the local area. And also if it's a certain areas, certain protected areas, they aren't even allowed to

do the reserve pit. They have to actually truck all the rock that they dig up offsite. But in most cases they'll just they'll dig this reserve pit and that's where they they're they're putting all the waste rock. Essentially, they also need to build a seller. Yeah, apparently to store the wine. That's exactly why they need to do that. That's providing the foundation of where the rig's gonna go. Right. So, once they've got the preparations out of the way, they

start to put together the rig. They ship in all the stuff and they start assembling it. The rigs power supply is all well. Diesel engines provide the power. They provide power to electrical generators, which in turn provide electrical power to the mechanical systems on the rig, the rig itself. Most people are familiar with the really tall tower that you can see on oil rigs, the derrick. Um, you

might wonder why those towers are there. I mean, most of the time we see like the old movies where we'll see the oil shooting out the top of the derek and you think, well, what's what the heck is the purpose of that thing? Um, it's actually there so that the oil workers can can assemble the pipe that is needed to continue to drive the drill bit down further and further into the hole. Because you know, as

you make progress, the drill bit goes further down. You have to extend that that that pipe so the drill bit can keep going down well. The tower is there so that you can put another length of pipe on

the end, and these links of piper about thirty feet long. UM. This is true both for the oil for the oil for the land based and the water based oil drilling, because they'll they'll have to and for the water based one, actually the pipe has to be even longer because first you have to get your drill bit all the way down to the ground, so you have to get it through all the water first, and then you have to keep extending it. So the the the drill of course

is based off rotation. It's a big turntable that is turned by and by the generators, the electric motors that are powered by the generators rather and UH that turns the the drill string UM and the drill bit which is at the very bottom of it. There's a there's

a color above the drill bit. The color is a thicker pipe that fits around the drill string and it uh its purpose is to protect the d but it's also to provide some pressure to push downwards so that the drill bid is constantly digging down, not just spinning

of anything happening there. And and they line the the well that they're drilling with a big pipe right to keep it from collapsing in on itself, because it wouldn't do any good to drill a hole if it you know, if two feet down the hole starts to collapse in on itself. So it's a it's a really involved process really, I mean, it takes a lot of manual labor to

get that going. And once the drill bid is is dragging up the or knocking out rock, that's when they start pumping the mud down to bring the bits of rock up and they collect those off and they put

in the in the pit um right. That that is another function of the casing the liner and that goes around is that it does help them drilling mud to circulate while they are drilling and get you know, the chips out and everything else that needs to come out because uh, you know, the circulation system is responsible for forgetting the mud um and and it's you know, it helps move things in and out. It's very important that they've got and it's man up of a number of

different pieces. Of course, it's got a pump in it and hoses. Um. There is a specific line to get the mud out of the hole. Um there's a shaker that gets the rock cuttings out of the mud so that I you know, they can recycle it because they do that. Um, they do that actually in the get this this is the technical term mud pit. Yes, the mud pit. They also they also occasionally have to make

some new mud. Um. You know, eventually they just they have to add more, especially once the holes getting deeper and deeper. Um, the as they're digging down there. What the goal here is to get to the point where you you are just hitting the pocket of oil that's underneath the surface. You know, you're not the Again that image of the oil shooting up through the derek, that's what we call a blowback, and that's not a good

thing necessarily. It's actually very dangerous thing. Blowback or blow out, blowout, sorry, blowout and yeah, there's you don't want those, that's bad. The reason for those blowouts, by the way, is because that oil is also mixed with natural gas, and both the oil and the gas are under immense pressure because you've got all this these layers of rock on top of them. So when you drill a hole into the pocket that has all the gas and oil in it, then you've got a release from that pressure and the

blowout can be very dangerous. In fact, that's what happened at deep water Horizons where there was a blowout which ended up causing um extensive damage. It ended up eventually sinking that rig and very tragically killed eleven of the workers on board that rig um the explosion did. Uh. And so you don't you don't want those blowouts, even though they're big dramatic moments and movies, you don't want to see that happen. Yeah. And in the movies they make it look like it's a it's a lot of fun.

They strike oil and it comes gushing out the top of the dereck and everybody you know, throws their hat in the air and hollers and uh and does a little prospect or dance. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's really the case. That And and it's you know, extremely toxic. It's not the kind of stuff that you want on your skin. So so, and in the environment, the the they have blowout prevent ers as they as they're digging. A blowout preventer is a pretty simple design. It's really just a

clamp um. It's powered by very massive hydraulic system. Uh. That is extremely powerful. That uh, and it's at the very top of the well. It's the well cap where where that where it connects to the drilling equipment. And then that may seem like a misnomer because if you've been watching the coverage of the deep Water Horizon thing, you might say, no, no, the blow up preventers at

things sitting on the floor of the sea. You know that's not No, that is at the top of the well because the well goes down into the ground there. So yes, it is at the top of the well. Yeah, if it were on land, it would be right there at the surface of the ground, just right red surface level rather as opposed to underneath the water. But I mean, yeah,

that's the top of the well. So uh if in the case of a blowout, what you normally would have happened, either you would have a sensor that would indicate that something bad is happening and it would automatically, uh activate the blow up preventer, or you would use a manual system like you would actually pull a lever, press a button to activate it and the clamp closes in on the casing and steals it off. Yeah, it's got a hydraulic ram that just you know, slam shut and basically

is supposed to cut off that flow. Unfortunately, in the case of the deep water horizon UM, the blow up preventer malfunctioned and just never it never activated, so there was no way to stop the the gas and oil from from essentially erupting from this well. UM. So normally with the drilling process again, you wouldn't drill to that point. You would drill to the point where you were detecting oil.

You know that it was clear that oil was present, but you wouldn't keep going until it was just shooting out at the top of the dairy. You would replace the rig with an oil production uh system, So you would actually deconstruct the rig and put in a new system there to to tap and collect the oil and in a very controlled manner, because that you know, that's going to be the least dangerous way of collecting the

oil UM. Right. You don't want to puncture the ground, the part of the strata of rock um stratum of rock that is holding the oil in until you're ready to collect it, because otherwise you're going to lose a lot of it or there will be a blowout. So you want to have everything in place and ready to go into you, you know, finally puncture that that rock area and then you can the oil will come up

through the well. And the way the way they do that is once they've got they've reached the well depth that they need to get to, they actually puncture holes in the well casing at the very base of it and uh and they use they seal it off first, and then what they do is when they deconstruct the rig and then move it out of the way they're bringing up pump and the pumps are those things that you see if you ever watch a movie set in like Texas or whatever, and you see those big metal

things that are swiveling up and down, looks like giant seesaw type things. Those are the pumps. And what the pumps do is they have a rod that goes down into the well um that creates suction as it as it moves up and down, and that's what allows them to draw oil out of the well in a controlled manner um. And uh It's occasionally the oil itself is too heavy to pull up on its own, so what they'll do is they'll drill a second hold down and they'll pump steam into that that oil pocket essentially so

that they can pull the oil up out of the hole. Okay, yeah, now we talked to a little bit about deep water horizon already. Um oh, I'm sorry. Were you going to to add something else? I was gonna addum that the device I don't I didn't remember you saying that. The device that they used to puncture um the well and put it into production is the perforating gun. Yes, and

they lower that down there. It's got a little explosive charge and basically they perforate the casing and put a tube in there um and then use a packer to uh, to form a seal around the outside of the tubing. And then theoretically the well is complete, right right, the tubing is is the only way in and out of that well at that point. So and then they have a Christmas tree. Yeah, they do. It's a that's that's a structure with lots of valves on it. It's actually

called a Christmas tree. Pullette was not not being I wasn't he wasn't goofy. Well, he was a little a little goofy, but not that goofy. Yeah, it's actually a device with lots of valves at the top and uh, it's it's cemented in and it's part of it. But anyway, that's that's part of the control system to allow for the controlled extraction of oil. And yeah, Christmas tree, So it's Christmas all year round on the oil rig in

some ways, I suppose. So. So yeah, going back to the deep water horizon issues, so that these are if you're out in deep water, they're really only two major ways that you can um you can drill for oil. One is to use a drill ship, which is pretty much what sounds like. It's a big boat that happens to have a hole in the center of it. Somebody is going right in that it's a big ship. Okay, here's the definition of ship versus boat. There is no

clear delineation. There's that You could say that a boat is small enough to fit on a ship, and a ship is big enough to hold a boat, but that is not That's like what's a mountain versus a hill. Well, a hill is smaller than a mountain. That is not a good enough definition. All squares are rectangles, but not

all rectangles are squares. So this boat has a hole in it, and uh right in and the drill extends down through the hole and that's where they pump the water and mud or whatever and down into it's it's it's just like the land based one, except you're on a boat, on a ship at sea and uh. But otherwise you would have an oil rig on the top with a derrick and everything to extend the pipe down to the sea floor bed and then further down as

you drill down into the well. Uh. The other option is a semi submersible MODU, which is a mobile offshore drilling unit. Um. That's what deep Water Horizon was. It was a semi submersible and uh that those float on

these big pontoons. They float out. They actually have a power system where you can pilot them out to the proper spot in the ocean and then you use you usually use anchors, several anchors to keep you in one specific spot on the ocean, and you use a very sophisticated This is actually where sophisticated technology comes to play. There's a sophisticated computer system that measures the tension on each line down to each anchor and then maintains the

proper tension to keep the semi submersible in place. You know what that's called. Right, what's that anchor management? I'm gonna need some of that in a second. Oh my gosh, I think I just had an aneurysm. So anyway, Uh, yeah, they might be up to a dozen anchors to keep these things in place. And then again you have a derrick on top of this this uh, this semi submersible vehicle, and you drill down. Now, if you're in shallower water, you have a couple of other options. Um, there's a

kind of modu called a jack up jacket. What you do is it's again a semi submersible, kind of barge submersible. Is it? It floats on top, doesn't it. Well, I mean it can have pontoons as well, but most of them are on barges, so yeah, most of them do just float on the surface. Well, you would float it out to the right location. And again this is where you're in shallow ish water, like up to around five ft which is still you know, it's pretty deep, but

shallow when you compare to deep water drilling. Um, when you get to where you want to go, you actually it can extend legs down from the barge to the sea floor, so you you create a tripod essentially a stand. Um, I think there's only three legs. Sometimes I guess there could be four. But you once you hit the cea floor, you then keep continue extending the legs, which raises the barge out of the water. And you keep doing that

to you get to the proper height. And of course you may have to extend one leg more than the other two because it's at a slightly different height on the sea floor. But um, you do this so that the reason why you go above the waves, so that the motion of the ocean doesn't interfere with your drilling activities. Now I'm gonna be singing rock lobster all day long. Thanks. Yeah, well, there are a lot of ruins in Mesopotamia. Um. And then the other method is just a submersible mobile offshore

drilling unit. And this this these are not used that often, but um, it's a it's a barge that actually sinks kind of. It goes down to the sea floor and then uh, the steel posts on the barge extend up and then you build your drilling platform on the posts. So you've got a barge sitting at the bottom of the ocean. Uh. And when I say bottom of the ocean, I'm talking like feet so it's not that deep, right,

comparatively speaking. Um. And then you got the posts on the bargees deck and you build the rig on top of the posts. So again the rig is is suspended above the waterline. Now, the reason why one of the reasons there are many reasons why the deepwater horizon issue this is the oil spill in the Gulf in case you weren't aware that that was what the name of

the actual semi submersible was. Um. There are many reasons why this problem is very difficult to handle, and chief among them is just that it is at an incredible depth. I mean that we're talking that the the well head itself is so far below the surface of the ocean. It's very difficult to get there. Right. We don't really understand that much about the ocean at this depth. Because it's there, we have very limited means of getting down there and exploring the pressure of the water at that

point is pretty intense. So there are very few vehicles that we have of that can safely navigate that that depth. UM. It's not like divers can just hop in and you know, go down and work with it by hand. For people just getting a look at it was was pretty complicated, especially considering that you know the explosion and fire where that you have to get that under control first. UM. So really the depth is the major point. Another problem is just that it's it is really hard to estimate

exactly how bad the problem is. UM. The earliest accounts had it just being a few thousand barrels of oil a day, which when I say just a few thousand barrel of oils forty two gallons of oil, it's a lot of oil. But the worst case scenario documents suggested that it could be as bad as a hundred thousand barrels of oil a day. So clearly this is a

this could be an enormous issue UM. And as we're recording this podcast, they're there are high hopes that the the replacement well is going to cap it UH to the point where where we can actually address the issue

more thoroughly. We'll have to wait and see if it works, but we're hoping because the other UM predictions for this said that the earliest we would be able to really address the problem would be August, and it's it's July of two thousand and ten as we record this, so um, considering that the initial event happened back in April, that's that's bad news. That's a lot of oil. Who they are BP is still working on drilling relief wells as we speak. And although you might believe that they are

there to relieve pressure, they're actually not. From what I understand from listening to uh an account on npr UM. Basically, what they're going to do is try to intercept the well itself, the original well, and shut it down from inside. So that's the point, and the thing is at this depth, as you were saying earlier, Nathan Um, it's it's very complicated.

They want to make sure that they're they're moving slowly because they want to make sure that they don't do additional damage and hurt their chances of getting it taken care of sooner, which I think was a source of frustration for a lot of people because they wanted it done and taking care of sooner rather than later. But they said, look, we've got to take the time. So it's it's it's very challenging to drill these wells and make them work properly, and when accidents happen like this, Um,

mistakes happen. The thing is fixing them is not a simple task either, and relies on quite a bit of technology to make it work. So I think we both found it, you know, kind of fascinating, the technology that they used to make it work at all. Yeah, it's it's a fascinating and sobering Oh, definitely subjects at any rate. Uh, but you know, the idea behind it is still pretty simple, drilling a hole down until you get but they things that you need to make that work in a safe

and controlled way are pretty impressive in practice. Yeah, it turns out we're complicated that you would originally imagine. Well, that was a good discussion about oil drilling, um and not not too terribly depressing. So good on us while we were just trying to take it from the middle ground, the technical aspect, this is how you do it. Now they told you how to do it. Here's the disclaimer. No, no one's gonna come up a well reg I mean, who could. We're going to get an email someone's gonna

be I struck gold. Hey, now let Gold Texas team. So we could talk about that in the future too. The minerals and getting that out. I don't know that sounds like stuff from the science left to me. That sounds science like that, physics, numbers and stuff, physics and geology. They can take that. All right, guys, we are going to wrap this up, but if you have any questions or topic suggestions you would like us to tackle in

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