How to drill an oil well for free...

[Mr. H.]

...and make money doing it!

1) Use one of those credit card offers that allows you to borrow money, interest free, for 3 months.

2) Borrow $8,000.

3) Hire a geologist. He'll tell you where there's a good place to drill. His fees- $1,500.

4) Go and talk to the landowners- ask them to allow you to drill on their land. You'll want maybe 500 acres in case you find oil. That will give you a good cushion, or "position". This prevents any one else from grabbing up drilling rights next to your gusher.
Cost of land aquisiton- at $10/acre... $5,000.

5) Hire a State registered and certified surveyor. He'll stake the drilling site and file the paperwork with the State (which includes their $100 fee).
His fees- $500.

6) Enter into a contract with someone who owns a drilling rig. Put down $1,000 deposit as retainer. There goes your $8,000.

7) Estimate the total cost of drilling the well. Your cost $0.
Pain in the ass factor... incalculable.

8) You figure up that the well, with a 3,000 ft. objective depth, will cost $150,000. You include your management fees of $2,500 for overseeing the project. You also charge your investors $16.50 per acre lease aquisition fee. This will cover that $8,000 you borrowed on the credit card.

9) Call everyone you know. Collect $150,000. Assign each of them an interest based upon their proportionate investment.

10) Pay off the credit card.

11) Get the well drilled.

12) Collect your $2,50 fee for overseeing the project.

TA-DAAA....

Now- go git 'er done.

 

[editec]

How to live like a millionaire by Steve Martin

First...get a million dollars. Then....

 

[Mr. H.]

Ah well, booze ramblings.
Now time for hangover ramblings...

 

[hilton]

I want to ask you about this procedure so tell me that ,
Does capping a producing oil well cause the well to "dry up" or lower the give in of the well when re-tapped.
Thank you in advance!

 

[RGR]

I want to ask you about this procedure so tell me that ,
Does capping a producing oil well cause the well to "dry up" or lower the give in of the well when re-tapped.
Thank you in advance!

What do you mean by capped or re-tapped? There are many ways to abandon a well, and many ways to re-open a plugged one should the need arise. Do you considering "capping it" just turning it off and letting it sit there for awhile? Years?

 

[uscitizen]

Umm I have been on a waiting list to have an oil/gas well drilled on my property for a few years now. All I want is free natural gas for my own use.

Damn Obama is making them not drill my well!

 

[Mr. H.]

I want to ask you about this procedure so tell me that ,
Does capping a producing oil well cause the well to "dry up" or lower the give in of the well when re-tapped.
Thank you in advance!

What do you mean by capped or re-tapped? There are many wells to abandon a well, and many ways to re-open a plugged one should the need arise. Do you considering "capping it" just turning it off and letting it sit there for awhile? Years?

A non-producing well can be issued a "Temporary Abandonment" permit, or a "Future Use" permit. This would allow the operator some time to assess whether or not the well will be re-worked or stimulated in some fashion in order to bring it back on pump. Otherwise, the well must be plugged which involves filling the hole with cement from top to bottom. In certain cases, the cement may be "floated" on top of a column of water based on the location of any fresh water zones. Anyway- once a well is plugged, there's no going back into it. It's cheaper to move over and drill a new one.

Umm I have been on a waiting list to have an oil/gas well drilled on my property for a few years now. All I want is free natural gas for my own use.

Damn Obama is making them not drill my well!

LOL. Is your acreage communitized with other properties? Is there a pooling clause in the lease? Delay rentals?

 

[RGR]

Anyway- once a well is plugged, there's no going back into it. It's cheaper to move over and drill a new one.

Not at all. Unless someone threw some chopped up rods into the cement plug, I can power swivel out the cement, send in 2-7/8 inside the old 4-1/2, 1-1/2 inside the 2-7/8, move in a pumpjack, and go back into production. Done it more than a few times. Isn't even that exotic of an operation really. I've done this to turn an old well back into a producer, and done it to set a new plug to seal off a zone so I can turn a nearby well into an injector.

Hell, I've plugged and reopened wells so old, they didn't even have API permit numbers. Had to get them permitted before I could plug them or even work on them! Thank God for the Appalachian Basin, without which Texans would think they invented the industry or something. Bunch of johnnie come lately pikers, is what they are.

 

[Mr. H.]

Damn you're good.

 

[RGR]

Damn you're good.

Nah, just been in a position where when weird technical problems came up, I was the guy responsible for solving them. Plugging old wells on federal property/wildlife refuges (on an island, 10 feet from the waters edge), reopening old plugged wells which hadn't been plugged properly, reopening old wells so I could repermit old producers as new injectors, recompletions in bad pipe requiring different, newer and smaller production pipe to be used inside the old stuff, it was interesting work, allowing plenty of off the cuff experimentation.

I've blown up bad casing during a frac job, initiating exactly the kind of problems anti-frackers have claimed, worked in H2S environments, and never drilled a vertical well in my life. Vertical wells! That's for the barbers and dentists to drill!

Nowadays I don't do field work, but I certainly use my old field experience to explain to others how to do things, or how things work, or don't work, or how Company A might solve Problem B.

 

[hilton]

I want to ask you about this procedure so tell me that ,
Does capping a producing oil well cause the well to "dry up" or lower the give in of the well when re-tapped.
Thank you in advance!

i think i need to more studies for it

 

[RGR]

I want to ask you about this procedure so tell me that ,
Does capping a producing oil well cause the well to "dry up" or lower the give in of the well when re-tapped.
Thank you in advance!

i think i need to more studies for it

Maybe. The oil and gas business is the most jargon ridden game I have ever heard of.

 

[Mr. H.]

Nipple up!

 

[RGR]

Nipple up!

We're stuck! What are the jars set for?!

Watch out for the cathead chain! (cathead? What about naming the other one the dog head?)

Kelly hose? Pony rod? Bridle (whats with the horse references)? Mud anchor (which hangs free inside the hole, not in mud, and isn't anchored?) Rat hole? Mouse hole? (now we like vermin?)

 

[Mr. H.]

Let's fish out a joint.

 

[RGR]

Let's fish out a joint.

Good one!

 

[Mr. H.]

Afterwards, we can pull a stripper.

Haven't spent much time on a rig floor, but I was on a pulling unit for a couple of years. Filled in for a pumper once in a while. It's physically and mentally taxing.

 

[RGR]

Afterwards, we can pull a stripper.

Haven't spent much time on a rig floor, but I was on a pulling unit for a couple of years. Filled in for a pumper once in a while. It's physically and mentally taxing.

I was in Dickinson ND a few weeks back, nearly pure oil town at this point, and I was eating in an Applebee's with a colleague before a big meeting, and I could pick out every floor hand and roustabout in that room. Moving that pipe around makes muscles (just imagine what Popeye could have looked like if he hadn't limited himself to just spinach), the guys dress similar, and you can just TELL when they are off tower.

The better dressed ones were probably drillers or tool pushers, maybe some of the service hands. I think off duty tool pushers tend to be a little cleaner than the service guys though, unless we throw in the engineers who run the jobs.

 

[Mr. H.]

I was in my early 40's at the time and yeah it buffed me up real good.
Cuts, scrapes, bruises, cracked ribs. But I learned more in that 2 years than I did in 35 years behind a desk.

I was busting out concrete tank bottoms with a hired hand, and he asked why I signed up for such a crappy job. When I told him that I own the company his eyes got big as saucers LOL.

 

[RGR]

I was in my early 40's at the time and yeah it buffed me up real good.
Cuts, scrapes, bruises, cracked ribs. But I learned more in that 2 years than I did in 35 years behind a desk.

Absolutely. I spent some 15 years in industry, drilling, completing, fracking, producing and running wells, pipelines, people and regulatory operations. That 1/3 of my career is now the basis for the other 2/3's, explaining how things work to politicians, academics, think tanks and consultants, scientists and students.