Don't Mess With Mother Nature

When I worked for Cities Service Oil Company my primary duty was sitting (staying on location, describing samples and calling for drill stem tests) drilling wells, mostly in Kansas. After months of learning from other geologists, I was allowed to sit a well in Comanche County, Kansas all alone. My first solo experience was quite traumatic.

The well was a wildcat (more than a mile from established production) scheduled to drill into the Arbuckle Dolomite, a very old carbonate that sometimes produces lots of oil and gas. At Cities, the technique for describing and drilling a prospect was well defined but had many flaws.

The powers-that-be considered Cities a technologically advanced company and would not drill a wildcat without seismic control. The geologist would locate an anomaly by doing subsurface mapping. He would then propose a well and management would either agree or can the prospect. If they agreed, the geophysicists would get involved and have a seismic survey conducted over the prospect. If the geophysics agreed with the geology, then Cities would drill a well there.

When I started working for Cities, the Mid-continent Division had not had a discovery in more than ten years. Part of the reason, I soon learned, is that seismic surveys never work perfectly. My opinion is that they rarely work, at least in Kansas. There are many reasons for this, most too technical to delve into in the space of a few hundred words. I had an inkling of this fact the first well that I sat alone because I had already had discussions with other disillusioned company geologists.

Every well is different and only a trained wellsite specialist can tell you exactly where you are in the hole, and if you are running structurally high (very good) or structurally low (very bad). There is a marker zone, the Heebner Shale, in Kansas that is almost always used to determine how you are running. When we reached the Heebner, I knew exactly where I was in the hole and called my boss to report the information.

“You must be mistaken,” Don W. told me. “If what you say is true you would be running fifty feet low. The seismic map says you should be running fifty feet high so you obviously have a hundred foot error.”

I tried to argue with him, explain that I knew where we were and that we really were running fifty feet low.

“You’ve missed a correlation point. Go up the hole a hundred feet and try again. You’ll find your mistake.”

From that point, my daily report was in La La Land. I knew where we were but my boss was becoming increasing confused to the point that he called me an idiot and threatened to send out a more experienced geologist to correct my obvious mistake. At one point, he almost had me convinced that I didn’t know what I was doing.

We finally reached total depth and when I looked at the electric log I knew that I had been correct all along. By this time we were almost seventy feet low to the nearest correlation point. There was no email in those days or any way to quickly transmit the logs to Oklahoma City for the honchos to view. It was four in the morning when I looked at the last log and realized that we had a dry hole. In a near state of despair, I called Don, my boss.

“Calm down, Eric. Everything will be okay. Is there any possibility that you are miscorrelating the log?”

There wasn’t, but it hurt my feelings that he was still blaming the failure of the well on me – at least that’s the way I felt at the time.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Bring the logs to the office. We’ll have a meeting first thing in the morning.”

Management cared little about their minions. Another geologist, a close friend of mine, had rear-ended a parked semi on the side of the road as he headed for a remote well site in the wee hours of the morning. He didn’t survive. It didn’t matter that I had been awake for almost twenty-four hours. I had my orders – drive all night and present the logs for management’s inspection the following morning.

I drove into Oklahoma as the sun was arising and made it to the corporate offices before nine the next morning. Three of my bosses studied the logs, frowned and scratched their heads, finally dismissing me without so much as a thank you or well done. Later that day, Fred, the older geologist that had taught me almost everything I knew, came to my office.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s not even your prospect.”

“I just can’t believe that management trusts a tool that almost never works over the word of their geologists.”

A big grin spread over Fred’s face. “Welcome to life as a geologist,” he said. “When you drill a discovery, someone else takes the credit but you get all the blame for every dry hole.”

“But Fred, seismic sucks. How can management continue to believe in it?”

“Eric, a geologist is nothing but a justifier, someone or something that gives the okay for a company to dump millions of dollars into the ground. You don’t really know any more than the seismic tool whether or not there is oil where you are planning to drill. We use the best science we have but once you are a foot below the surface of the earth - and you can take this to the bank - it’s all Mother Nature, and she doesn’t give up her secrets easily.”

Fred was correct. I have drilled many dry holes in my career and I’ve worked with lots of people and many companies that have had their discoveries. And sometimes when I wake up at night and stare into the darkness, I can hear old Mother Nature giggling to herself.

Gondwana Press