Drilling Rigs and Surfboards Are Basically the Same Thing

What was Peter rambling about?

If you heard me madly typing away while on the pod... My wife set the record straight.

Two of the most famous waves that only break once every few years are Belharra in France and Cortes Bank off the coast of California. They require very specific and rare conditions to become surfable.

• Rig Types - Singles, doubles, and triples based on how many drill pipe joints they can handle
• Drill Pipe Basics - 32-foot joints that get reused, repaired, or scrapped for pennies
• Surfing vs Drilling - Fin setups (single/double/triple) surprisingly mirror rig classifications
• TST Explained - True Stratigraphic Thickness accounts for angles when measuring rock layers
• Geologists on the Job - They create maps, plan wells, and guide drilling in real-time
• NORM Definition - Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material found in oil/gas operations
• Azimuth Navigation - Compass directions (0-360°) used for drilling and 3D positioning
• Remote Geosteering - Experts now steer wells from home using real-time data feeds
• Team Communication - Geologists say "where to go," drillers figure out "how to get there"
• AI Impact on Work - Tools speed up tasks but create mental fatigue from faster decisions

Transcript

Peter Brecht (00:00) Here we are, week 35. I am counting the weeks still—I probably should stop doing that, but it's just a way to help keep track of it. But anyway, I've been busy this week with academy things and hiring people and trying to figure out how to keep going with life in general. My kid, man, he did not want to go to school this week. I don't know if that ever changes.

Wade (00:07) It helps anchor us. Did it take some convincing? Are you a stick or carrot kind of parent? You know, is it like "get out of the car, get in there," or are you trying to bribe them?

Peter Brecht (00:32) It's a mix. Both my kids are so different, right? So my son's very headstrong, likes things a certain way. So I have to be loving yet firm. And then my daughter's more compliant—she's more of a people pleaser, I guess. So with her, I don't have to try as hard, but I have to make sure that she doesn't bribe me. You know what I'm saying?

Wade (00:35) Yeah, she's got you wrapped around her finger? That's right.

Peter Brecht (00:58) Totally, I gotta be careful with that. So I get my wife involved on that one because my little girl—she wants candy and man, she gets it. I gotta be careful of that.

Wade (01:05) Alright, she can get her way. I got one of those—a few of those actually.

Peter Brecht (01:11) Yeah, it's fun. So that's been my week. You're still drilling, right?

Wade (01:20) Yeah, we started a new well this week—just a day or two ago. We finished the last one, moved off it last week and spudded in yesterday morning.

Peter Brecht (01:24) Another one. And how deep are you guys by this point? Like a day later, are you a thousand feet down?

Wade (01:38) Right now we're at about 3,000 feet, 3,500. A lot of times we'll make better progress than that. This one's going a little bit slower up here in the shallow interval.

Peter Brecht (01:41) You're still casual about it. To me it's like, "this is part of my day," you know?

Wade (01:54) Well, to an extent, a lot of people call it a treadmill. The challenges always change—the rigs change, locations change, formations change—all those different things. But a lot of it's repetitive in terms of the day-to-day and what you're doing. So it's like anything else, man. You kind of get used to it.

Peter Brecht (02:18) Right, makes sense. Well, I got some questions for ya, as I always do, but this morning, doing my typical Twitter scroll just to catch up on what's going on out there—I don't even like doing that anymore, but that's a long story. I follow a lot of oil and gas on Twitter. Dan Doyle posted a video—bad injector, things smoking out, whatever—but then I was reading the comments like I always do and someone mentioned it was a double rig. And then I got to thinking, well, "double" implies that there's a single and maybe there's more than that. So there's different types of rigs?

Wade (02:45) Yeah, you hit the nail on the head there. So you got doubles, singles, and triples. Most of your modern rigs—I don't even want to say modern—most of the rigs probably in operation right now are triples. Really what that's talking about is how many joints of drill pipe it can pick up at a time. So triple can pick up three joints, double picks up two, a single picks up one. That has a big effect on your efficiency, how fast you trip in, how many connections you have to make.

On a triple, you can pull three joints of drill pipe and break it every roughly 96 feet, 100 feet. Whereas on a single, you're making connections every 32 feet or so on those joints of drill pipe. That relates to efficiency, but also usually size. Triples are usually bigger. They rack back more drill pipe. They have bigger derricks and more hoisting capacity and all these different things. They're more for your horizontal deeper wells.

Peter Brecht (03:48) And the length of drill pipe again, is it 12 feet, 16 feet?

Wade (03:55) Drill pipe's right at 31, 32 feet. So each joint of drill pipe is about 31 or 32 feet.

Peter Brecht (04:02) I'm surprised that hasn't been standardized down to the inch—maybe it has been, but...

Wade (04:09) Well, they usually come out pretty similar, but as you repair and all these different things, the lengths of them could change some. You don't want to just scrap that much metal—you want to fix it as much as you can.

Peter Brecht (04:17) So we're reusing it effectively at some point. I would imagine it would be expensive to even just recycle it or reprocess it.

Wade (04:31) Yeah, they'll sell it for scrap and you're getting pennies on the dollar really, but anything helps.

Peter Brecht (04:36) And I've seen some drill pipe that comes out—I mean, it's so twisted you couldn't twist a straw that much.

Wade (04:43) Yeah, some of those are definitely turning, that's for sure. I've seen some bent. I've never had any corkscrew like those. Some of those pictures show helical—it's like a permanent deformation in this helical pattern. I've never done anything like that. We've bent a couple of joints before, but never anything like what they're talking about with that helix formation.

Peter Brecht (04:48) Alright, so we've got singles, doubles, and triples. Well sounds like I can relate to that, like with surfboard fins—you got single fin, double fin, triple fin.

Wade (05:14) Really? I had no idea. Now when you got a single fin, is it usually one big fin? Because on triples, isn't it like two smaller ones and a bigger one in the middle? Or how does that work?

Peter Brecht (05:27) Yeah, so the single fin will have—it's mostly for longboarding, right? Sometimes you'll get a fun board that's like a fish, so it looks like a little fish. You put a single on it, but there's all kinds of weird—surfers are weird. They like to just vary, like, "hey, I rode this board that had no bite on the left and it had it on the right," and you're just like, "okay, why'd you do that?" "Because it was fun and I shaped it," right? So my wife rides single fin predominantly. It's just a different style. And then you've got the double—two fins on the side and then triple. So triples are fun. They're a little faster typically, but yeah, surfing and oil and gas are so related. I don't even know it.

Speaking of, I got our new website up and my buddy, JJ Wessel—there's a picture on there that really kicked this whole thing off for me. There's such a story behind it. But if you go on our site at LocalEnergy.com and you scroll down, there's a photo that JJ took. It's Scotty Stopnick surfing out there at Huntington Beach with one of the rigs in the background. And I saw that picture back in 2014 when he first took it. Up to that point, I really hadn't paid attention to the offshore rigs in California, but then you start noticing them. You're like, "man, that's a cool piece of art." And I really wanted to get it framed and put on my wall. Didn't happen.

And then a couple years later, I'm talking to JJ about it because now I'm doing this and I'm like, "man, I got to get that picture." So he's like, "with what you're doing, it's all yours. Do with it what you want." And it's cool. California's Center for Energy and Science used it in some of their marketing last year. And then we sent a version of it to Digital Wildcatters and they have it up in their studio.

Wade (07:07) That's really cool. Yeah, there's a long history out there, Long Beach and all that stuff. It's crazy to see all those pictures of those rigs right there on the beach.

Peter Brecht (07:26) I still want to do tanker surfing in the Gulf. I think that'd be a blast.

Wade (07:32) What do you mean by tanker—like you surf the wake of a tanker?

Peter Brecht (07:36) Yeah, so they got—it's been done. There's guys that'll go out and they'll ride for two miles on a board and by the time they're done, they're just cooked. But it's a whole thing. It's really cool. There's some videos on YouTube you can check out. They're small waves—you think like, no, there's no barreling, but you can imagine just kind of walking on water, like three to four foot wake and you're just being part of it. It's fun. And that's really for me what surfing is. It's not this crazy "let's smash the lip and go back down." I just paddle, enjoy nature. You get to stand up on a wave and it's just fun to be part of the ocean really.

Wade (08:08) When I was about 15, I went on a trip to Hawaii with my parents and there was a huge storm that came through and we were somewhere over there. There was this huge cliff that goes straight down into this little bay and all these cars stopped and we stopped with them to look down there. And it was these dudes riding these huge waves. I was 15, so I'm probably making up numbers here, but I swear they were like 30, 40 foot waves and they would catch this wave and ride it and this jet ski would have to zoom in and pick them up and run them back out before that next wave hit. We're talking like hundreds of people just stopping right there on that cliff watching all this. It was just absolutely amazing to watch those guys surfing those waves.

Peter Brecht (09:04) Yeah, well there's in Maui you have Jaws, right? So that's one of the bigger breaks there and it's famous. I think it was a year or two ago, Jaws had a break that was like 72 feet. It was a world record for that particular break. But then you go to Portugal—there's a break called Nazaré and you see the video, there's memes on it and stuff, but you've got this beautiful church lighthouse on the edge of this cliff. And then you see Nazaré breaking on the right and it's a left hand so you take a left. The guys that wipe out on that—there's so much with surfing that you just kind of—all the breaks. I don't know, it's nothing I would ever do but my wife would probably tackle something like that in her younger days I'm sure.

Wade (10:05) So I got a question for you here. Whenever I think of surfing, I think of one specific movie. What movie do you think that is?

Peter Brecht (10:27) What should it be? I know you're the movie guy. Is it the one where the guy's got to do the seven different—oh gosh no it's Point Break. Everyone thinks Point Break.

Wade (10:42) Yeah, that was 100%. Point Break was the first thing I thought. Johnny Utah, out there riding.

Peter Brecht (10:44) Yeah. The Point Break wave—I gotta remember the movie. [Googling] It's not the wave from Interstellar. I should know this too. Maybe it isn't Point Break, because it's the wave that breaks off of California, breaks once every 10 years. Maybe it is every seven years. Anyways, I'll have to find it. It's gonna bother me. I can't believe—if my wife was here, she'd be screaming from the other room if she could hear me.

Wade (11:24) I was gonna say your wife would probably know it.

Peter Brecht (11:44) Alright. Cool. Well, back to oil and gas because apparently that's important. I had an abbreviation for you. And I think you know this one. We've talked about this one before, but TST.

Wade (11:46) True stratigraphic thickness. I think it would be that one. So that's more on the geology side of things. Talking about essentially how thick a formation is. They use that a lot because like if you drill at an angle through a formation, you can't just use your TVDs because you could—if you enter over here and you exit over here and there's like a dip in between, you can't just go "this depth from this depth and that's your thickness." You have to—TST essentially normalizes for your bed dip and the angle with which you go through the zone. And so that way you know like, "the Woodford's 250 feet thick." So even though it may have taken you something like 400 feet measured depth, or your TVD change could be 220 feet, it just takes into account a few different things there.

Peter Brecht (12:33) You guys are working pretty closely with geologists then on the planning side. They're integral to this whole thing.

Wade (12:46) Oh yeah. 100%. Geologists usually—they're there from the planning of the well until you TD. A lot of times, every company is a little bit different in their planning process, but a lot of times it starts with a geo-prog, so that's geological prognosis. They essentially create this document that tells you where all of your formation tops are as you go down to your zone.

You use that information to create your well plan. So I need to have a geo prog or at least formation tops before I go out there and start working with our directional company to create a well plan. So they're involved in the pre-planning process. They're kind of one of the first ones to really touch all the information and data out there. And then they create their documents, they pass them on to drilling, drilling uses them to plan our stuff, but then also we work with geology throughout the execution of it too. Whether it's picking casing seats for your casing runs or building your curve, landing in zone, targeting in your lateral, all those different things are usually done in communication with geology.

Peter Brecht (13:58) I didn't realize that was so—you kind of think geologists would be like, they have a map of underground already, so you already have the data. Why do you need the same person again? But apparently...

Wade (14:13) Well, they're usually the ones who create that map. So they'll go out and back in the day, they'd grab all the logs and then they'd put the depths on there and then they kind of had to hand draw them around, drawing all their contours and stuff. Now a lot of that's more digitized. You've got software packages that go out there and will create those structure maps and all that stuff for you. It's still the geologist's responsibility to look at it, make sure everything makes sense in terms of everything that they look at, deposition and whatnot.

Peter Brecht (14:41) I would love to get a geologist on here with us. I want to talk to a geologist. We've got to find somebody.

Wade (14:50) There's some characters out there. We've got to find ourselves a geologist with some character.

Peter Brecht (14:57) So here's one I thought, maybe he knows, maybe he doesn't, but what is NORM?

Wade (15:04) I don't know. I just go normal. I have no idea what that was. That was a new one to me.

Peter Brecht (15:08) It may not be upstream. NORM according to the search I did, it stands for naturally occurring radioactive material. So this can be present in produced water and scale deposits from oil and gas reservoirs.

Wade (15:25) Interesting. Well, that would be like your gamma ray detectors. Like that would be potassium, uranium, thorium. Those are naturally occurring radiation.

Peter Brecht (15:33) Right, so NORM is measured. It can be present in produced water and scale deposits from oil and gas reservoirs. That's a new one. Maybe it's used, maybe it's never used. Who knows?

Wade (15:46) That's one that I haven't—I can't say that I've really run across it. The definition you used seems like it had more to do with the production side. We do read some of that naturally occurring radiation though on the drilling side. I just hadn't heard that one. Learn something new every day.

Peter Brecht (15:54) Throw it out there and see if anyone else recognizes it or calls you crazy.

Wade (16:13) I'll reach out to some of my production friends and see if that's something they ever talk about.

Peter Brecht (16:17) A couple days ago, or like a couple weeks ago, we were talking about how wells are drilled, and you were explaining the term azimuth to me. And I haven't stopped thinking about it because at the time you're like, "it's kind of complicated to explain" because it is—how do you explain it over video first of all? But one thing that I've started figuring out, so I've been working on these 3D models of a horizontal well. Because I want to basically create something that's tangible that people can click on and all that. But what I've learned is it seems to be very relevant in three-dimensional renderings also. So like you'll basically take a 3D object file and then you have to plot the X, Y, and Z for all of the interactions. And I think that's more or less what an azimuth would be—it's determining based on a north point or something like that, what's happening.

Wade (17:17) Yeah, so I think the other day we were talking about vertical section azimuth. So if you just look at azimuth, azimuth is just the direction that you're headed. If you're going north, like if you're going due north, then you're going to a zero degree azimuth. If you're going due east, that's a 90 degree azimuth. South, 180 degree azimuth, and so on.

Peter Brecht (17:38) Just like a pilot would use when they're flying.

Wade (17:46) Yeah, exactly. So azimuth is really just a direction. Vertical section azimuth is something that we use to calculate distance from surface hole in the direction that you're drilling because that calculation takes into account your VS azimuth—you'd get very different calculations. So a lot of times on my surveys, I'll be checking like my bottom line survey. So I'm looking at measured depth, inclination, azimuth. Those are just actual tangible measurements, right?

But then I also look at TVD, that's a calculated value. I look at vertical section, that's a calculated value. And vertical section is calculated using vertical section azimuth. So if my VS azimuth number is input wrong—if I think I'm drilling in this direction or if I'm calculating the drilling of this, but I'm drilling a little bit off of it, then my azimuth number will come back calculated a little bit different. Oh, hey, I need to double check this survey file. I need to make sure that all my data or all the data they're sending is correct.

Peter Brecht (18:41) So are you measuring this based on degrees? Like are you telling your geosteering guy like, "we need to move this two degrees left or down"? How does that work?

Wade (18:50) That's a little bit of a different conversation, but yes, that's exactly how the communication goes. A lot of times, I'll start that discussion because I'm watching geosteering as well—my background is in geosteering. But most of the time, that's the geologist that's watching that. They're correlating, they're seeing where we're at in zone. And what they'll do is they'll call the drilling team and they'll say, "Looks like we're getting towards the top of our zone. Bed dips are 90 degrees and we're at 92 degree inclination, so we're moving up in relation to those flat bed dips. Hey, we need to drop inclination. We want to target this spot." And so then we'll say, "okay, well, what do we need to do to get down to there?" We make a plan. How far are we going to slide? How aggressive do we need to be? All those different things. And so that's kind of how that feedback loop, that communication loop goes.

Peter Brecht (19:43) So it's very collaborative then. There's a lot of communication going on between geosteering and you guys on drilling.

Wade (19:45) Oh, 100%. And drilling. Everybody's got their lane that they kind of stay in. Every company is different though, so a lot of times those lines kind of bleed across. But at the very base level, what I'd say is geosteering and geology is like, "here's where we are and here's where we want to be." That's what they're saying. And then drilling's job is to say, "okay, here's how we're gonna get there" and then to execute on that plan and get there. So if you imagine, I guess it'd be—you've got like in a submarine, you've got a navigator who's back there charting the course and all that stuff. That's probably your geologist saying, "here's where we are, here's where we want to go." But then you've also got the guy who's got his hands on the control that's turning the screw. That's probably more your drilling guy.

Peter Brecht (20:20) I love that analogy. That's a good one. Very cool. So these geosteering guys are working from home now too? I'm hearing about that. How does that work?

Wade (20:47) Yeah, it's everywhere. Every company is different. So some guys are actually geosteering on location. Sometimes your mud logger will also be a geosteering guy or sometimes your geologist would be out on location and he'd be looking at samples and then geosteering as well. So it works all different ways. One of the most common now in horizontal drilling is you've got a group of people who geosteer these wells remote. They can live all over the country. When I started a geosteering group early in my career back in 2009, we were steering wells all over the country from Oklahoma City. We steered Pennsylvania, Williston, we steered California, we steered Texas. We looked at stuff overseas as well. We never actually steered one real time there. But we were steering stuff all over the country.

With the way that communication goes now and the way that data is delivered, I've got an EDR—electronic data recorder—that's delivering me data with a one second delay that's actually happening on the rig. And the funny thing is, I get so used to looking at it the way that I look at it on my screen and all that stuff, even when I'm on the rig floor with all the different things in front of me, like if we're working stuck pipe or tight hole or whatever, I don't look at all the gauges out there because that's not how I'm used to looking at it. I'll be standing on the rig floor, but I've got my iPad up and I'm watching the curves right there because that's the way that I usually interact with the data.

So the geologists and your geosteering, it's the same way. They usually work towers when you're geosteering. So you've got one guy that's working days, one guy that's working nights. They often send out an update after every survey. A lot of times these companies, they're usually not always employees. They're kind of like a contract third party. And so they'll be getting the data through email or through your EDR and sending out those updates every time you make a connection.

Peter Brecht (22:44) And are they on a laptop? Can you do this from a laptop where you're clicking with a mouse?

Wade (22:57) 100%. Yeah, laptop, desktop. They've got them now, I think, to where you could do stuff from your phone. I don't know if you can actually steer from your phone, but I know that they've got these apps to where you can share your correlation. So if you're sharing it with your team or your COO or whoever, they could log in and see your correlation real time as you're manipulating it. And then they could say, "Hey, what about this? What does it look like with 88 degree bed dip?" So you'd be able to do that on your phone. You would see the correlation change. So that way you're not going back and forth through email and doing all that stuff, having to create reports and do all that. It just speeds up that communication process if it's vital.

So everything's remote now. Used to, before cell phones, they'd fill out the report and they'd have to drive into town and call it in or fax it in or do all those different things. And now, last night I got a call in the middle of the night and we lost circulation and I'm watching them work blocks and talking to them, giving them my thoughts on what I'm seeing and how we want to deal with it, real time. So it's crazy. It's crazy how much it's changed.

Peter Brecht (24:03) Gosh, that changes a lot. But you know the good thing is I guess you're getting a phone call at two in the morning instead of having to be out there on the rig at two in the morning, right? So maybe there's a plus.

Wade (24:13) Yeah, 100%. You got to find the bright side in everything.

Peter Brecht (24:20) Yeah, trying to figure that one out still with technology. We're going so fast. Because I was even thinking about this—my brain, even though I'm using these ChatGPT tools and things like that to get stuff done, and I know a lot of other people are too, I don't think the human brain was really designed to be able to process information that quickly almost, right? Like, okay, we've got the information, but now I have to make another decision based on what I have. It doesn't slow down the decision making process. It actually makes it worse, you know? Or you have to still think at the same speed. I've been thinking about that a lot. I'm more exhausted mentally now after using these tools than I was before, even though I'm getting maybe three or four times more done. My brain is—and maybe I'm just getting older, but I don't know.

Wade (24:56) I like it. I don't enjoy the really tedious work of accumulating the data and all that stuff. I like making decisions. I like pattern recognition and thinking about the problems and all that stuff. I do not like the data entry and the little minutiae type deals. I have to be able to do that in order to be able to do my job, but I really enjoy the other stuff. For me, I get to get to the part that I enjoy so much faster. That's one for me. That's the way I kind of look at it. But it also makes me be a much better multitasker because I'm running something over here and while it's thinking and doing that, I'm moving on to something else. And then I'm like, "okay, well, I got to go back over to here." So I'm kind of having to train myself a little bit as well.

Peter Brecht (25:38) I like the perspective. That's a good one. It's the 80-20 rule—80% of the stuff you do is going to influence the important 20%. So I need to stop being such a perfectionist on some things. Anyways, cool. Well, hey, man, I know you got a lot to do. I want to be respectful of your time. And I'm going to keep working on stuff. But good luck on your meetings. And hopefully, we can catch up again soon. Thank you guys for listening. Thanks for being on here. Check out our new website, LocalEnergy.com, and we'll see you next week.

Wade (26:02) Yeah. I appreciate it. Alright, next week.