Off by 238,000 Pounds: What Weight on Bit Actually Means

When Peter looked at drilling rig specs showing a 1 million pound hook capacity, he made an "educated guess" about weight on bit: 250,000 pounds.

He was off by 238,000 pounds.

The reality?

Most drilling operations apply just 12,000 to 30,000 pounds of weight on a 6-inch drill bit. And according to Wade, that's actually a tremendous amount of pressure.

"Man, you think about it. Think about putting that much weight on six inches in diameter, you know? It's a lot of weight."

So Why Do You Need a Million-Pound Hook?

This is where the difference between weight on bit and total hook load becomes critical.

Weight on bit is only the pressure transferred down to the drill bit itself. But your total hook load includes:

• The entire weight of your drill string (200,000+ pounds on a horizontal well)
• Hole friction from pulling against miles of lateral
• The weight of your casing strings

When you're drilling 4-mile laterals in places like the Utica, you're not using 4-inch drill pipe anymore. You're running 4.5 or 5.5-inch pipe with much higher weight per foot. Add in extreme hole friction from pulling against that entire lateral, and suddenly you're seeing hook loads up to 350,000 pounds or more.

Some wells in southern Oklahoma run 16,000 to 17,000 feet of 9 5/8-inch casing at 45 pounds per foot. The math adds up fast.

The Takeaway

Your intuition about drilling pressure is probably wrong. The actual forces involved are simultaneously smaller than you'd expect (at the bit) and larger than you'd imagine (total system loads).

It's a perfect example of why the oil and gas industry requires such careful engineering. You're managing hundreds of thousands of pounds of force with precision, all while drilling miles into the earth.

Highlights

1. The 250,000 lb Guess (23:10) Peter guesses weight on bit based on rig specs. Wade's response: "Well, man, that's a lot. That's a whole lot." The real answer: 12,000 to 30,000 pounds on a 6-inch drill bit.

2. Why You Need a Million-Pound Hook (24:41) Wade explains the critical difference between weight on bit and total hook load. Spoiler: it's not about the bit at all—it's about pulling 4-mile laterals and heavy casing strings.

3. Swabbing: Bringing Dead Wells Back to Life (13:12) Wade breaks down the process of removing fluids from loaded-up wells using rubber cups and wire line. "You do multiple runs, swabbing just barrels of liquids off until the well can start flowing on its own."

4. Water Flood Economics Are Brutal (18:03) "You're pumping a hundred barrels of water down a hole hoping to get back like half a barrel or one barrel of oil." Wade explains why water floods are end-of-life tertiary recovery.

5. The AFE "Free Loan" Trick (19:58) "If you're going to drill a well and you make that AFE super high and people have to prepay their percentage, you essentially got a free loan." Wade reveals the games operators play with Authorization for Expenditure.

6. Light vs Heavy Oil: It's All About Carbon Chains (10:10) Wade walks through the chemistry: methane (CH4) to diesel, and why longer carbon chains mean heavier hydrocarbons. Bonus: why Oklahoma diesel "waxes up" in extreme cold.

7. Race Car Fuel Changes with Temperature (12:19) Peter shares how his dad would run different fuels at 100° California tracks versus 40° Ohio races. Wade confirms: "That would make perfect sense... you want to be running as efficiently as possible."

8. 350,000 Pounds at TD (25:14) "When we start pulling out of the hole at total depth, a lot of times we'll see anywhere up to 350,000 pounds." Wade explains why hook loads spike when fighting hole friction in horizontal wells.

Complete Transcript

Peter Brecht (00:00) All right, Wade, how are you doing? Yeah, anything new and exciting?

Wade (00:01) I'm doing good, I'm doing good. Yep. Been a busy week, but good week. Yeah, I family stuff going on. Ended volleyball last night, got football tonight. And so it was kind of bittersweet seeing the end of my daughter's like high school volleyball career. She's not going to play like college or anything like that. So that was pretty emotional, pretty awesome night too. Just brought back a lot of memories. So that was good. But moving on to football tonight, Friday night lights, you know, I got a sophomore playing and that's been a ton of fun to watch.

Peter Brecht (00:19) Yeah.

Wade (00:34) See him kind of grow through all that stuff. But other than that, work's been going good. Finished up my last well with the operator we were working with here over the last probably, that I've been working with over the last probably six months. And it's just been a great experience. Had some really good results. And so like got to meet some new guys and work with a new team and really enjoyed it. They were good people, great people to work with and all that. So man, everything's been good. I got no complaints. How about yourself?

Peter Brecht (00:45) That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, steady, just been steady, right? We've got a lot of projects we're working on. So we've got our fourth Academy group starts in two weeks. We're building this AI tool right now that is just mind blowing. We did a demo with our team on Tuesday. I mean, like you're always scared to do a live demo of anything, but we took some documents and like ran it through like first time, hadn't run it through and it worked perfectly and I was like, my gosh, thank you. So it's been a lot of fun with that. We could talk more about AI because we had so many people asking about Power Automate and what you're doing there. But like, yeah, the AI stuff has been fun. It's actually getting, it's getting really good and it's really, it's enjoyable now, right? It's, I don't know, the more time you spend with it and so that and kids playing baseball and...

Wade (01:34) I got you. Yeah, I saw a couple comments.

Peter Brecht (01:48) Same thing, man, I can't complain. We've had just, I've enjoyed really personally the last two weeks, all the guests that we've had on and been able to talk to, like, it's been fun, so.

Wade (01:57) The oil field is full of just, I mean, not just like big personalities and all that stuff, but like just amazing people. Technical, scientific, and operational. I mean, it's just, dude, it's full of amazing people.

Peter Brecht (02:09) Yeah, and they all got great stories and experience. So anyways, I hope to call many of them lifelong contacts, let's put it that way. So I wanted to dig into, because right before we jumped on, you were texting me, hey, I'm playing with Claude code. And so I got to ask, what are you doing over there?

Wade (02:23) Yeah. Well, what I okay, so I talked last week about the mud report analysis that I was running kind of doing all that through power automate and GPT and all that and I read that so Claude came out with sonnet 4.5 and just from like the benchmarking I've been using Opus 4.1 and it was doing really great but 4.5 came out and I just saw some headlines on it and read into it a little bit. I mean, I'm not ultra-technical, so I don't understand all of it. But one of the headlines on it was something like it ran an analysis without user input or something like that for something like 36 hours. I'm just making up stuff there. I can't remember what the headline was, but it was something really impressive. And so I just went to it, and what I essentially asked it to do was recreate that mud report analysis that I had made in GPT, but do it, I just told it autonomously, run with it. And I've just been playing with that this morning and it's pretty impressive. I mean, it runs very differently. So this is something that like runs on my local machine, a lot of Python scripting, all that stuff. And there's some, I think there's some good and bad with it I'm still kind of debugging some issues right now. But you know, what probably took me, I mean, it was over 40 hours and I was learning a lot too. Like I knew nothing. I had never opened Power Automate before that. So I mean,

Peter Brecht (03:30) Yeah.

Wade (03:47) There was a steep learning curve there. And I'm kind of having that same learning curve with Python right now, but it is catching up. It feels like it's catching up quickly within the first three hours of messing with it. It feels like it's kind of where almost where I left off on GPT. And so I won't know until I fully get there. What I realized is that, man, you got these ideas and you throw it in there and it seems like you're 90% of the way there and like,

Peter Brecht (03:53) My gosh.

Wade (04:16) I would say a few hours, but getting that last 10% and working through those little bugs has proven like really challenging. It's taken more time than getting that first 90%. And so, you know, it's just playing around with it, learning the system and learning all kinds of new aspects.

Peter Brecht (04:32) I love what you just said there about the last 10% because if I know Wade, it's that he's a first 80% guy, right? And then that, you know what I mean? But now you're getting that last 10, that's pretty good.

Wade (04:38) I am. It's really frustrating. It is so frustrating. Well, I have to because like, you know, I plan on this on this report having memory like looking back through the entire well, not just at that single report. And so like one of the first stupid problems I ran across was that it was grabbing spud date from the report as actual report date. And so like every time it would try and write a new line of memory of essentially what happened, it was all trying to overwrite that same day because every day was being reported as spud day. And so, you know, it's just stupid stuff like that. But I mean, it's just absolutely frustrating. But also, like whenever you can finally figure out what it's doing or how to overcome it, like that's what actually gives like that sense of accomplishment, you know. Otherwise, it's kind of, yeah, it's awesome, but at the same time, like, you know, without any...

Peter Brecht (05:12) Yeah.

Wade (05:28) effort put into it. There's just usually not a big sense of reward.

Peter Brecht (05:33) Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally hear you. We're like, we did a demo on Tuesday of something we're building for our team, right? And basically quite, quite simply, like we took all of our, all this data about the oil and gas industry, like truly like books that we scanned and not all this crazy stuff, put it into these data buckets. And then we trained this tool through Gemini vector. I think it's called sorry, Vertex, it's a vector search through Vertex to basically take insurance policies and then build out like a full analysis, like a risk analysis based on it. It has been, I mean, something that would probably take my team 12 hours, two days worth of work is now done within 20 minutes or less. And it's just, it's insane. It like blows my mind. And then I'm sitting there, I'm thinking, okay, so if this only takes us 20 minutes,

Wade (05:41) Right.

Peter Brecht (06:23) Like what do I do with the rest of my day? You know, like I cause, cause carriers can only work so fast, right? So it's like, I'm just, I don't know. I guess I gotta go, I gotta find more stuff to do now. That's the whole thing.

Wade (06:34) Well, I mean, that's what I've gathered is now if I can get rid of this busy work or the small little gathering the data and putting the data together into this understandable format, if I can accelerate that, man, my ability to make decisions or take on multiple projects to do those things is just greatly increased. There was a comment I think this week about, that was asking, are you afraid of being replaced?

Peter Brecht (07:01) Mm-hmm.

Wade (07:01) I mean, I think that fear is always there, but it's replaced not by this computer, but just by other people who are actually more efficient than me. You know, it's kind of like in the United States, we've gotten really efficient at drilling wells, right? Which means that we need less rigs to produce the same or even more oil and gas, you know, in a less amount of time. And so what do we need? We need less rig hands, you know? And so, you know, my thought on adopting AI and all this is like, it's 100% going to remove some jobs and some people. It just is because the efficiency increases that we'll see with it. I'm one of those people who's using it and can interact with it and build things with it and do all that stuff, hopefully you're one of the ones that gets to stay around. Because I don't see it ever fully replacing. There's a lot of great comments out there. It'll never replace somebody working floors and throwing slips and doing things like that. And so it's just a really, really interesting time. And I feel like if you're not embracing it, you're probably falling behind a little bit. And I saw a post from Chuck Yates this week on Twitter, and he mentioned something about filling regulatory forms and Collide is out there.

Peter Brecht (07:55) Yeah.

Wade (08:16) filling these regulatory forms with people's data and information. And I've been building something kind of similar in cloud in terms of, yeah, in terms of just grabbing data and information, like, you know, OCR and PDFs, getting that data and information out into usable formats, and then putting it into, you know, whatever documents you need it to go into. And it's not a really labor intense process to build it. It takes some back and forth in order to...

Peter Brecht (08:23) Really?

Wade (08:42) kind of get everything to work right, but once you do, man, it just makes the process so much faster.

Peter Brecht (08:48) Totally. I mean, collide the post you're talking about and I'll put it in the show notes, but yeah, they're basically filling out W10s automatically. Which is, I mean, it does take a lot of time and I got to actually sit through the demo with Chuck at one point and he showed me how it works and it's like, I think that's impressive. I mean, one thing that is the bane of my existence is, you know, we take in a lot of data and then we have to do the same thing. You have to put it into reports and PDFs and formats. And if you could, if I could just figure out how to, you know, make all my PDFs fillable like that. My gosh. Like the, the power there would be incredible. I'd love that. So no, absolutely.

Wade (09:12) Right. Brut.

Peter Brecht (09:23) And I like I know you're on twitter but you're like you're like a lurker like I never see you comment on anything.

Wade (09:28) I'm a lurker. I don't post. I don't interact. Like, I've got socials and things, but I rarely post stuff.

Peter Brecht (09:35) But your bio line, if you're gonna be a bear or be a grizzly, I mean, I love it, I love it. It's a good one. That is a great motto, it's a great one. Very cool. Well, I wanted to, so this kind of might be pulling back into your chemistry days, but I wanted to talk about the chemical compound of oil and gas and kind of the specific thing that I was trying to unravel.

Wade (09:39) That's our family motto. That's our family motto. Well.

Peter Brecht (10:03) is what makes oil and gas light or heavy? Is there something like what is that differentiating factor?

Wade (10:10) It's the length of the carbon in the structure is really what makes it lighter or heavy. So, you know, your longer ones are heavier, your shorter ones are lighter. So like take gas, methane, CH3, you know, that's where... I'm sorry, I think that's actually CH4. But yeah, and so whenever you extend that chain, then it's CH3. But as you get longer and longer, you go from like... In products, everybody would know you go from like...

Peter Brecht (10:13) Okay.

Wade (10:37) Methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane, and then you start getting longer. You start getting into your gasoline, diesel's way down there at the end, heavier and all that. So yeah, so it's your carbon chain is what makes it lighter or heavier there. Generally speaking.

Peter Brecht (10:40) Okay. Okay, so the carbon and then you've got oil like oil is gonna have more I don't want to call them like like it's more stuff mixed in there like not pollutants really but you're gonna have so oil is gonna have like asphalt like they're gonna extract asphalt from that they're gonna extract wax from that like paraffin wax and all right is that is that the idea?

Wade (11:11) Well, yeah, they start breaking it down. So you start separating out the length of your compounds by purification process. It's multi-step, but you're essentially separating out your different length of your chains. You rarely get like, it's not like you're separating out like C7, you're usually separating out. And this is, I'm getting outside of my...

Peter Brecht (11:32) Yeah. Sure.

Wade (11:32) my knowledge base here, but you're separating out a range of carbon links in there. Usually it's based on, I don't want to say boiling point, but I mean, you're using heat in order to separate these out so that one will go up to the top of your tower and one will drop down to the bottom. And then you can kind of continue that process as you go in order to separate the length of your carbon chains.

Peter Brecht (11:38) Okay.

I think it'd be fun at some point for us to talk to someone that is doing fuel. Like, I'm thinking like, find someone that does like, here's Formula One fuel, here's jet fuel. And not only just the refinery, but talk to the guy that's building the race car. Because I mean, my dad would run, when we were kids, he had an old vintage car that he would race.

Wade (12:02) 100%. Refiners, that's what you need.

Peter Brecht (12:19) It was fun to go to the track, but he would run different types of fuel in the car depending on the environment of the race. So you run something different here in California when it's 100 degrees outside versus Ohio when it's 40 degrees outside. And it was kind of fun. And my dad was kind of, he always has been sort of kind of nerds out on stuff like that. We might get my dad on here and be a blast, but my gosh.

Wade (12:33) Right. You should. I mean, we see that all the time. I mean, whenever we're out there, whenever it gets really, really cold, at least in Oklahoma for us, really, really cold, your diesel will start kind of waxing up and getting thick and you can't pump it through and do all that. And so that would make perfect sense that, especially in a machine like what you're talking about where I'd say quarters of seconds count huge. You want to be running as just efficiently as possible.

Peter Brecht (12:52) Yeah. Yep. Oh yeah. Mm-hmm. No, I, yeah. That'd be, I don't know. I love cars, like why not? You know, local energy, we can talk, I think we should be able to talk about cars. You know, that we're burning fuel. Yeah, I think that'd be a good time. All right, so I'll go ahead and ask, but yeah, what is swabbing?

Wade (13:12) That's an interesting application of that. Right. Let's do it. Yep. Swabbing is essentially the process of removing fluids from a well bore. Whenever fluids start getting in there and the well loads up, whether you shut the well in or it gets hit by an offset frac, what will happen is the fluids will build up there in the vertical and the well stops flowing. That's what we call loading up. It's no longer producing any oil and gas, anything like that. What you do is you come on with rig and this rig has a has a line and at the bottom of the line it's got, we call them swab cups. Think of a length of the rubber cups and they kind of are cupped in an upward fashion like this. There's a number of them. And you drop down with that wire, with that line there with those cups on the bottom, you go down, you'll hit fluid, you drop down below that fluid and then you just start pulling it out of the hole. As it pulls out of the hole, it keeps a quantity of fluid above it.

as you're pulling up. Now some's also gonna go around those cups and kind of fall back down to the bottom. But you do multiple runs, swabbing just barrels of liquids off of your well until it gets to the point that that hydrostatic pressure has been decreased enough to where the well can start flowing on its own.

Peter Brecht (14:32) Hmm. Okay, so is this, this is done after drilling then, right? Is this more, is this, this is more of a maintenance thing?

Wade (14:42) Yeah, this is usually after your initial flow back and all of that. This is usually further down the life of the well. Yep. Normally at the beginning of a well, the well will have enough. Now there's reservoirs that don't have tons of reservoir drive or pressure to be able to kick themselves off. So you kind of got to go in there and maybe swab it back. But most new wells have enough reservoir pressure and drive to kick off on their own and to get the fluids out.

Peter Brecht (14:52) Okay, understood. So.

Wade (15:09) As the well gets older and it loses some of that reservoir pressure, you have to go in and bring those wells back online.

Peter Brecht (15:16) Okay, got it. That makes sense. And it's, I mean, I'd probably imagine that would be, I don't know if the operator would probably hire someone else to do that. They're not gonna necessarily do that themselves. Okay.

Wade (15:25) Yeah, yeah, usually you don't have your own. I mean, some companies do, some companies will have their own trucks that'll go out there and do that and their own operators and all that. But those rubber cups, as you run them down, as you pull them up, they get damaged. And when you're on surface, you gotta check them out. If they get damaged, then they're not lifting as much fluid, it takes more runs. And so you're swapping out those cups. You gotta...

Peter Brecht (15:35) Okay.

Wade (15:48) You got to be careful about how much you're pulling out. You're watching your line tension and all those different things. You don't want to get so much water that you either come off of the line or anything like that. There's a lot of things they got to watch, but for the most part, it's really just going down there, pulling fluid out, allowing the well to get back to producing.

Peter Brecht (16:07) Okay. Yeah, it makes sense. There's a thing I learned this week and actually this, you may know the answer to this or actually I'd like to ask our listeners this question, but in the state of Texas, you could have multiple wells, but if it's a water flood unit, the RCC will call it one well. And I'm curious.

two things, which is, is that true and why do they do that? I was talking to an operator out there in West Texas, he's got Wells 191 or something like that across the state. And he was talking about how they, because you get the well schedule, you go through it and he's like, oh, that's actually, you know, multiple wells, but they counted as one. I don't know. It was interesting.

Wade (16:36) Right. I think, I'll take a stab at it. I haven't really worked water floods in Texas, but I'm guessing just based on probably what you're seeing and everything, all of it goes to probably all the production ends up at a single tank battery and that's where it's separated and trucked out of and all that. And if you've got, say that you've got in a water flood, depends on how big the water flood is, but say you got 30 or 40 wells, like.

Peter Brecht (16:49) Yeah.

Wade (17:10) having each individual well with its own monitoring system in terms of tanks and volumes and meters and just all of these different things. I mean that's a pretty, I don't want to say labor intense, but it's a pretty economically intense activity having 40 different meters and all those things set up. And so if you can take all of that to a single battery, and most of time these water floods are pretty close to each other.

Peter Brecht (17:27) Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Wade (17:38) in terms of physical space. But if you can take that all to a single battery, then you're just pumping right out of there. And then also productions, like your revenues and stuff are just split out evenly among owners of each well-born stuff. So I think it just probably streamlines the entire process and makes it a lot more economic. Because also water floods are usually like, I may be making this term up, but like a tertiary recovery. I mean, it is end of life. Like, you're pumping a

Peter Brecht (17:39) Mm. Yeah.

Wade (18:03) hundred barrels of water down a hole hoping to get back, I think usually like a half a percent to a one percent water cut is pretty good. So I mean, you're pumping a hundred barrels down to get back like half a barrel or one barrel of oil, you know, and so those are just really economically tight kind of activities.

Peter Brecht (18:10) Gosh. Yeah. Huh, interesting. I mean, I kind of wonder at what point you just decide to be done with it. And then what do you, I mean, you do like a P&A on it and then just the, well, you're just done, right? Is that the idea? Yeah.

Wade (18:35) Yeah, you'd have to. I mean if there's no upholstery zones to go back and work over or do anything like that, you know, then yeah, you know, you go and P&A your unit and you're done. Yep.

Peter Brecht (18:41) Yeah. Okay, you're done. It's okay, good to know. I just, yeah, and I know the Texas RCC, like everyone's got their own way of looking at it for regulatory reasons, but that was cool to learn on this one. So, all right, let's see here. All right. Abbreviations. Let's go through a couple of these.

Wade (19:07) Okay.

Peter Brecht (19:07) Here we go. What is A-F-E?

Wade (19:11) Authorization for expenditure. All right, so yeah, essentially an AFE, you kind of, you're making a plan or you're kind of laying it out on paper for how much you think you're going to spend for whatever activity you're doing. AFE for drilling, completions, you know, tank battery, surface installations like tank batteries and all that stuff, even workovers, all that. So you kind of got an AFE, here's how much it's going to cost, use that to run your economics, you know, here's how much we're going to spend.

Peter Brecht (19:13) Let's go, easy.

Wade (19:35) Here's how much we're gonna get in return. And yeah, AFE.

Peter Brecht (19:38) How much of a buffer are you building into that number? Like, personally, if I was gonna do a renovate on my home, I would add probably 10 or 15% to what I think it's gonna cost. And I still think I would be grossly under, but I mean, realistically, what would you, is there anything you're packing yourself with?

Wade (19:47) Right. Everybody does it differently. Every company does it differently. There's even games to be played with some of that stuff, for better or worse. Because sometimes you have to prepay on your AFE. And so, if you're going to go drill a well and you really make that AFE super high and people have to prepay their percentage of that AFE, you essentially got a free loan. It's an interesting deal there. The other thing is too is...

Peter Brecht (19:58) Okay. Okay. Hmph. Yeah.

Wade (20:22) I've been in, I don't want to call them battles, but I mean, you're like fighting for operator ship with the OCC or with the Railroad Commission, whatever. And one of the things that's sometimes taken into account, it's not like I would say the driving factor, but I mean, if you can harvest those hydrocarbons for cheaper than the other person.

Peter Brecht (20:32) Yeah, yeah.

Wade (20:45) You know, it's more economic for everybody. And so, you know, if you show up to the courthouse and you've got this AFE and you prove that you can actually do it for that, you know, you say, hey, we're gonna drill and complete this well for $5 million. You know? And look, we've drilled 100 of them just like it for right around $5 million. And somebody else shows up and says, well, we're gonna drill it, but they say they're gonna drill it for $7 million. Why would you go out and say, well, yeah, let's just spend $7 million for the same well?

Peter Brecht (20:53) Mm-hmm.

Wade (21:11) You know, so it's a really interesting kind of back and forth right there.

Peter Brecht (21:15) So why do you have to take your bid to the OCC or the RCC and tell them what it is or is that not part of it you're just using as an example?

Wade (21:23) Now that's not, I would say that's not standard that you have to take it to the, I mean, you always, you know, you're submitting your AFE to your partners and doing all those different things. But if you're going and kind of fighting for operatorship, then that's one of the things that you have to submit is your AFE. And that's the reason why, yeah. So normally though, I mean, normally you're not out there having to kind of fight to be operator on each one of your sections. You know, most of the time.

Peter Brecht (21:27) Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Got it. Understood.

Wade (21:50) You just send out all your notifications and everything. All your land department, all those guys work together and kind of make deals and agreements before you kind of get to that point. But it happens. It's inevitable with everybody. At some point you're going to want to drill a well and somebody else is going to say, now we want to drill that. And it can kind of come to what I'm referring to there.

Peter Brecht (22:10) Gotcha, okay, cool. Thanks for the context, that's helpful. All right, second abbreviation. What is NOX?

Wade (22:18) N-O-X, nitric oxide, I, you know, I'm not quite sure where we're going.

Peter Brecht (22:22) So you're on the right path, right? So NOX, it's a collective term for nitrogen oxides, primarily nitric oxide and nitrous dioxide released during oil and gas operations. So they just title it NOX because it's, you know, NO and NO2. So it's interesting. Okay. And then I think this will be my favorite one. And I think you're going to get it. But what is W-O-B?

Wade (22:25) Okay. Okay, yep. Right, okay. That's it. Okay. Wait on bit. my gosh. I was thinking of, I thought you were gonna go to WOC, which is like waiting on cement or something like that. And I was like, WOB, yeah, wait on bit. My gosh, I can't believe that one took me a second. So yeah, that's just how much weight you're putting from the drill string down on the bit.

Peter Brecht (22:52) There you go. Ha ha. Alright.

Wade (23:08) Let me ask you a question, all right? Okay, say that you got a six and an eighth drill bit, Okay, drill bits, 6.125 inches in diameter. What do you think a normal weight on bit would be for that drill bit? Like how much are you actually applying?

Peter Brecht (23:10) Okay. Okay.

My question first would be, wouldn't that weight vary depending on how many lengths of drill string you have already? Or is the weight on bit always gonna be consistent based on the drill bit?

Wade (23:33) It's not always consistent. I'm not gonna say it's always consistent. And you do have a difference between sliding and rotating. I'll say this, sliding, you can put a lot more weight on the bit whenever you're sliding. You're also not getting all of it down there. You've got hole friction and all that stuff. I mean, like, just, you know, I would say, you know, drill bits, there's usually like a maximum that they kind of recommend. There's some numbers they can throw out there. Now you can go over it and do all those different things, whatever you want to do.

Peter Brecht (23:41) Okay.

Wade (24:00) But there's kind of a standard range where people run. And I was just wanting to think, like I'm just wanting to see if you get close or if you're kind of off by orders of magnitude.

Peter Brecht (24:09) Okay my only point of reference is, my neighbors, drilling rig that I sent you the specs on. 10,000 PSI mud, 65,000 foot pounds of torque. So I'm going to guess, I don't know. 250,000 pounds.

Wade (24:17) Okay. Okay. Well, man, that's a lot. That's a whole lot. I'd say anywhere from, you know, on the low end when you're drilling, it'd be like 12,000 pounds. On the higher end, probably 25 to 30,000 pounds. I mean, man, you think about it. I mean, think about putting that much weight on six inches in diameter, you know? It's a lot of weight.

Peter Brecht (24:27) Okay. Okay. Yeah.

I'm looking at the spec sheet right now, but it's, it's yeah, but like a 1 million pound hook. Like, what do you even need that for? Is that just over engineered or like, where would you use that on the land rig? That's crazy.

Wade (24:41) Like the hoisting capacity and stuff. Oh no, well, I mean, if you think about it, I mean, that's, so when we're talking about weight on bit, we're talking about just how much we transfer down to the bit. But I mean, that doesn't even take into account your string weight. You know, when we're pulling out the hole, you know, a lot of our wells, now we drill with four inch drill pipe in a lot of our stuff. And so that's a lot lighter. I mean, that's 14 pounds per foot. You know, so our hookload, our hookload when we're in a horizontal well is, you know, 200,

Peter Brecht (24:99) Okay. Yeah.

Wade (25:14) 200,000, 225, something like that. Everything depends on your depth, right? And then as you're pulling, you also have to overcome your hole friction in your lateral, and if you got a nudge and all that stuff. So when we start pulling out the hole at TD, a lot of times we'll see anywhere up to 350,000 would be one that you could see pretty easily, right? So 350,000 pounds is what you're pulling out of the hole. But that's with four inch drill pipe. I mean, you think about some of these guys that are, you

Peter Brecht (25:36) Gosh. Yeah.

Wade (25:40) Some of these guys, these Utica wells or whatever, that they're drilling four mile laterals, I mean the hole friction and the pipe weight, I don't think they drill those with four inch drill pipe, I'm almost certain they don't. Those are probably either four and a half or five and a half, something like that. And so your pounds per foot, the weight of your pipe goes up, your friction's really high because you got four miles of lateral you're pulling against.

Peter Brecht (25:44) Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Wade (26:02) you could really use some high hoisting capacity at that point. And then the other thing is some of these wells, I mean, there's some stuff down in southern Oklahoma where they'll run, man, I think they were running 16, 17,000 feet of nine and five eighths casing that can be like 45 pounds per foot. And so, I mean, you're talking about some huge, huge numbers, some really heavy weights. And so,

Peter Brecht (26:17) Wow. Holy moly. Yeah.

Wade (26:28) you know, whenever it talks about hoisting capacity, that's really what that's referring to is, you know, how much weight you can pull.

Peter Brecht (26:34) Okay. Overall, yeah, okay because you have the totals. All right. Got it. That's that's impressive. I mean Yeah, but but I mean even at 12,000 is it 12,000 foot pounds or no, it's not it's not torque rate It's just it's just weight on bit. So it's just gonna be how are they is that just you're putting like 12,000 pound weight Up in the air and that's what's pushing it down. Yeah, okay

Wade (26:37) Yep. Yep. And there's usually a safety factor below that. It's just pounds. Yeah, you're putting anywhere from 12 to 25,000 pounds down there.

Peter Brecht (27:03) Okay. Yeah. And then how are you adding weight as you, cause I'm guessing you need to increase your weight or decrease your weight, right? At some point, or is it consistent through the drill? Okay. How do you add weight? You have to, okay. Okay.

Wade (27:12) Yeah. Yeah, you increase. Well, I mean you've always got excess weight because your string, say your string weighs 200,000 pounds, like, you know, you've got 200,000 pounds of string weight that you could just drop on it. So you're consistently you're always just kind of coming down real slowly, just adjusting, you know, adjusting that weight based on on how quickly you kind of lower your blocks.

Peter Brecht (27:21) Yeah. Right.

This is so, I love this. This is like a whole nother thing that I never thought about.

Wade (27:38) I may have said foot pounds, now that you mention that, I may have said foot pounds earlier. It's just a thousand pounds with weight on bit and foot pounds is your torque.

Peter Brecht (27:43) Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. Man, you just opened up a whole other world of drilling that I never thought about. So I love that. This is why I love talking to you.

Wade (27:55) Yeah.

Peter Brecht (27:56) All right, thank you guys for listening to this week's episode of local energy. Wade, thanks for jumping on. I know this show is super sporadic. We got some exciting guests coming up in the next few weeks and excited to chat with more people about interesting things. So I'll see you next week.

Wade (28:10) Yeah. All right.