Is Florida made of sand?

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
Stupid question time: If that brine layer has the weight of 5000 feet of soil on top of it, does it squirt upwards when you make a hole in the clay layer? How far up?

Seems like a perfect setup for an artesian well of horrid sludge.
They use heavy salt water during the drilling process so that in theory the standing column of water in the well is greater than the dynamic head pressure the aquifer has.

Also when the drill a well they grout seal the casings for several thousand feet before they hit the higher pressure water or oil formations. That way it prevents or at least greatly reduces the likelihood of an uncontrolled blowout.

As for putting the stuff back down the well the disposal stations have massive piston pumps that look just like giant triplex pressure washer pumps but they are 50 - 200+ HP and can pump several hundred GPM at 1500 - 2000 PSI to get the water to go down the well instead of come back up.

BTW around here when they get a dead oil well they plug it just below the salt water aquifer and turn it into a disposal well. The problem is there are so few bad wells here that there is a high demand for disposal well sites thus the ones that are running can earn the landowners more a year than had it been a good oil producing well.
Oil wells only run until their holding tanks are full or until whomever the pipeline is connected to stops needing oil. Disposal wells usually run 24/7 and never go bad. ;)

I have mineral rights for some land from my moms side of the family and they are so worried that when they drill well in the next few years that we might end up with a bad well. I have told them that if that happens I will happily buy all of their mineral rights for what ever they think they are worth! :D
 

Metalmann

Joined Dec 8, 2012
703
"Also when the drill a well they grout seal the casings for several thousand feet before they hit the higher pressure water or oil formations. That way it prevents or at least greatly reduces the likelihood of an uncontrolled blowout."


Yep, I remember it well, (pun intended)

BP, didn't do that right.;)
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
When I first started driving truck in the oil fields I heard a few stories about how back in the 1970's when they first started putting oil wells in our region there were a few low budget drillers who didn't do proper if any grouting work and in fact did have the salt water aquifer blow out.

Fortunately the surface head pressure and flow rates are not terribly high so as I understood it they quickly drilled down a 1000 or so feet beside the blown out well and dynamited the bad bore shut but to this day there are a number of places that still have contaminated groundwater from those events.

Back around then there was a company that tried to mine salt here by using the brine to make road salt but it never proved cost effective to clean it up to the level of being usable as a road and sideway ice melting salt base. Pretty nasty stuff. :eek:
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
Very educational...to the point that I feel embarrassed at how much I don't know about drilling wells. Apparently sticking some 10 foot sections together to get a lawn sprinkler pump going has nothing to do with drilling for oil.
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
There's always a lawyer somewhere in the crowd.

(What? You think every 20 foot deep lawn sprinkler in a city of 3 million people filed an environmental impact statement?)
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
When I was in the oil fields I asked a lot of questions to whom ever I had the opportunity to!

Amazing what people will show you if you just show the initiative to ask how what they do works.

I had seismologists show me their whole seismic mapping systems and how they track the drilling heads remotely from literally miles away.

Then there were geologists explaining exactly what they are seeing and looking for in the drill tailing samples they watch.

I even had the grouchy old company men who run the rigs tell me their life long stories about how they came to have the jobs they had and then give me in detailed tours of their rigs explaining what everyone and everything does and why. :cool:

What was interesting to me was the directional drilling head systems. The guys who ran them said that they could drill down two miles then make a sweeping curve for another 1000 feet hit the 10 - 15 foot thick oil formation and continue drilling two more miles horizontally right in the middle of it with the accuracy to put the 16" - 18" drill head in 55 gallon drum sized target area 99% of the time.

Which I believed being the seismic mapping guys showed me that they can track the noise the drill head makes to within a +- 12" resolution from up to 5 miles away. :cool:

Contrary to what you hear on the news any decent drilling company has a very precise idea of what their machinery is doing for good or bad from start to finish. :cool:
But then like any other industry you do have a few of those careless and crooked idiots crews who have to go and ruin things for everyone.:mad:
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
Ooh! I'm scared! I'll run right to an EPA website and report the water well I am not going to drill. Now, quit hijacking my thread Loosie.
 

shortbus

Joined Sep 30, 2009
10,045
+1 on what tcmtech said about the well drilling guy's. Had two directional wells drilled on my property in 2000. Spent some time talking to the drill operators and geologist about how and why. Thought I might be bothering them, asking questions. But when you showed an interest they would talk for ever about what and why.
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
My grandfather spent his days at oil wells, and sometimes got stuck babysitting me. I might have learned something, but he abrogated his responsibility to a can of beer. Half a can and I was, "Lights out" for the afternoon. (That's all I could hold when I was 10 years old.) He simply pist away the chance to know his grandchildren. The only good part is that it did not influence me to be an alcoholic in later life.

I did learn one thing. The rigs that were drilling where I was, worked by dropping a heavy piece of steel against the bottom of the hole and I learned that the spring at the top of the rig was a vital element in making the thing drill. Compare that to knowing how to make the hole go sideways and it's obvious I know nothing about drilling.

Oops. Spoke too soon. I left a 10 foot piece of pipe leaning against the fence. The last time we had a heavy rain, it sank into the sand and almost make a lawn sprinkler well.:eek::D
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
FOR REAL THEY HAVE SIZMET LABS COVERING THE U.S......THEY CAN PICK UP POWER TRAnsformer hum.
The day I got to spend a bit of time with the live seismic mapping guys by their monitoring trailer was very educational.

They were showing me how their grid of surface based sensors are so accurate that they can track vehicles on roads in real time if they shift the monitor field of view from deep subsurface to surface tracking.

They pulled up their recording going back about 30 minutes from when I showed up on site then gave me a full detailed replay of my work truck driving up to their site from about three miles out.:cool:

It even showed where I missed a turn and backed up about 150 feet. :p
 
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tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
One thing I found informative was what realy happens when people got killed in rig accidents.

When I was driving truck I went to two rigs that had had workers killed a few days before I was on their sites.

The news and media made a huge fuss about how careless and unsafe rig sites were. Total BS.

Both sites company men and crews all said that the guys who got killed had been warned multiple times to not do or go where they did when they got killed.

One was where a guy got crushed between a truck and a tank. The guys who worked with him said they literally screamed at the guy not to walk between the trucks and tanks when they were being loaded unloaded or adjusted plus the guy had been written up multiple times for it as well. It was a clear and well understood no go zone.

Same with the second site. The guy who got killed had been given countless warnings to not do what he was doing when whatever machine he was messing with killed him.
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
Darwin at his best?

To the contrary, one of my cousins got burnt at an oil well, and he wasn't all that stupid. (He survived and is still alive 50 years later.)
Then, I have heard that insurance companies list drilling rigs as the first or second of the most risky jobs.

One fact, one hearsay.

Comments?
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
OK. I'll answer me.

Somebody must have been doing something stupid. Any source of sparks or flame at an oil well is stupid, and there was obviously a source of ignition or it wouldn't have ignited.

Insurance ratings? Low percentage question to ask on an electronics site. Probably no experts here.
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
Oh I think the rigs are plenty dangerous but they also do put above average rules and procedures in place to try and limit injuries and deaths.

I was at a rig site one time that had big "NO SWIMMING." signs on all of their open top chemical tanks.

I asked their safety officer about them and if they were serious given the types of chemicals they use to treat some of the fluid used in drilling.

He said yes they were! In fact they had some guys who hopped in the tanks one hot day to go swimming, He said that fortunately they had just cleaned the tanks and put fresh water in otherwise had the they been filled with the typical chemicals they mixed in those tanks (strong hydroxide bases or mixed acids that eat flesh) those guys would have been dead before anyone had time to figure out how to get them out of the tanks.

Seriously some of the workers they have on the rigs are that stupid.
 

THE_RB

Joined Feb 11, 2008
5,438
I say take down the warning signs and let Darwin improve humanity.

He's been hindered for far too long, by the sound of it. ;)
 
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