Why 3,000 Pounds of Sand is INSANE

Links

• Smoke or Fire: Petcoke as proppant increases production vs. sand only on Collide.IO
• Article: Wireline Insights from an Oklahoma Independent 

Show Notes

1. Washouts in Drilling Operations What causes formations to wash out during drilling, how washouts can trap drill bits and cause operational issues, using gravity and motor orientation to navigate washout zones, and real-world examples from Oklahoma drilling operations.
2. Evolution of Wireline Technology Interview insights from an 80-year-old wireline veteran who started in 1970, building custom wireline tools from patent research in the 1970s, the 1980 logging revolution and why older logs are harder to read, and technology transitions from individual gauges to integrated displays in 2004.
3. Proppant Science: Why Sand Matters How hydraulic fracturing creates flow pathways in rock, the role of sand as proppant to keep fractures open, volume requirements of 3,000+ pounds of sand per foot, and evolution from premium Northern white sand to local alternatives.
4. Pet Coke Innovation at Exxon Using petroleum coke waste as advanced proppant, achieving 7-18% production increases in first-year results, logistical challenges requiring rail transport, and plans to scale from 50 to 200+ wells using pet coke.
5. Technology Adoption in Oil & Gas Historical perspective on industry technology changes, adapting measurements from wireline to MWD for downhole tools, AI concerns versus historical technology transitions, and learning from other industries through cross-departmental innovation.
6. Sidetracking and Directional Drilling Open hole sidetrack techniques and gravity considerations, using MWD for tool face orientation, survey verification to ensure proper hole placement, and common challenges when accidentally entering old wellbores.
7. Movie Reviews & Industry Abbreviations Quiz Tombstone movie discussion and Arizona filming locations, technical abbreviations including EMW, φ (phi) for porosity, and TOC variations, plus Wade's continuing perfect quiz streak with one correction.

Transcript

Peter Brecht: Alright, here we are, Local Energy. I'm your host, Peter Brecht, and my co-host, radio star Wade Spear, joining me from Oklahoma. Wade, how are you doing?

Wade: Doing good, man. It's beautiful right now. The weather's starting to get a little bit warmer up here. Last Friday night, my boy was playing football and I was actually getting kind of cold—it was in the 60s with a nice little breeze. We've got 93 for a high tomorrow. So this is football season now, football weather at least, early football weather.

Peter Brecht: Yeah, we're seeing the changing of the seasons, right? But we're not quite there. California's cooling down. We're heading to Arizona in a couple hours—it's gonna be mid-90s.

Wade: But it's a dry heat, yeah.

Peter Brecht: Exactly! Anyways, I got you something. Before we go any further, I gotta grab this and send this to you. We went to a Savannah Bananas game and Wade, I got you a hat and your very own banana ball. So this can go on your desk. When you go to a game you can wear those with pride.

Wade: That's awesome!

Movie Talk

Peter Brecht: I got some personal news for you too. I'm working my way through your movie recommendations. I was less than thrilled with Interstellar. I have toyed with the idea of watching it again just to see what I missed, but I don't have the confidence yet. But Tombstone—I will tell you, it's actually in my top five. That movie was excellent. I truly don't know how I missed it all these years.

Wade: It's amazing.

Peter Brecht: I mean, just a great show and a great movie altogether. I still have Tenet and I still have The Smartest Guys in the Room on my to-watch list, but Tombstone sounded the most interesting. And plus we're going to Arizona where Tombstone was shot, so I thought, hey, let's go check it out. It's a long movie—two hours—and the filming is insane. The opening sequences and the music and the whole thing, it's an experience.

Wade: It's got so many one-liners in it. Val Kilmer was amazing. It's one that we quote all the time.

Peter Brecht: Yeah, and the quotes—that's what did it for me, the realness of it. The one quote that I love the most was "There's no normal life. It's just life. So get on with it." That's my favorite.

Wade: That's not one I would have picked out. I mean, like, "I'm your huckleberry." That's one. Or "Ringo looks like somebody walked all over your grave." There's a lot of really good ones. I would say next, don't go to Tenet next. Go to The Smartest Guys in the Room. Watch that one. You're gonna understand a lot of the guys on Twitter—you're gonna understand where their handles come from now, like where their Twitter names come from. Kenny Lay and all that stuff.

Peter Brecht: I'll have more of an appreciation for it. Well, I'll do that then. Have you seen The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou? It's a Bill Murray film.

Wade: Yes, yes. I'm not a huge Wes Anderson fan.

Peter Brecht: I like how Wes Anderson shoots his films—same thing as Tombstone. I like how he shoots but it's a little quirky.

Wade: All Wes Anderson films are quirky. Let me say, I want to get into them. I just have such a hard time really enjoying them. But I got one of my best friends, man, he loves everything Wes Anderson. It's like his jam.

Peter Brecht: There are some weird ones, don't get me wrong. I'm not like a Wes Anderson fanatic. He has a fan club, but there's some that I don't like as much, but that's one I enjoy. And I think it's because I like Bill Murray so much.

Technical Discussion: Washouts

Peter Brecht: Let's talk about some oil and gas. There was a comment on one of our videos and there was something that I didn't understand. The comment was: "Washouts were causing them to tag their bit before they got stuck." I didn't know what a washout was or what it meant. I could have googled it, but I thought I'd just ask Wade.

Wade: I didn't read that specific comment, but I would imagine what they're talking about is—whenever you're drilling, especially if you're drilling with water-based mud, your formation essentially gets wet, right? Soaks up some of that water and some formations, depending on what their composition is, they will what we call "wash out."

So as your bit's going down, say we're drilling with an 8¼-inch bit, you've got an 8¼-inch hole size rock or the formation that you're actually cutting out. Now, because you're pumping this fluid and it's going fast and it's got these velocities, some of these formations aren't very competent—they don't just stay right there. And so as that fluid's going by, it's actually washing some of that formation out.

Here in Oklahoma, we see that all the time shallow. If you're drilling with water-based mud, we'll be drilling with an 8¾-inch bit, but we've run caliper logs down in there—acoustic calipers that send out sound waves and read them back. And we will see hole sizes in some of these upwards of 24 to 30 inches. So even though you only drilled it with an 8¾-inch bit, it's two feet to sometimes almost three feet wide in certain intervals.

That's usually shallow and in your red beds or things like that. As you get deeper and your overpressure gets higher, you have less and less washout. Some formations don't wash out. If you're drilling through a lime or something like that, a lot of times those stay what you'd consider gauge hole, and your calipers will show that.

What he's probably referencing is if you've got a long enough interval of a washed out hole, your bit can kind of trail off a little bit and get caught up on some of that washout. Especially we see it a lot of times if you're going from a washed out hole back down to a gauge hole—you'll go down and you kind of tag up in there and you wash and ream and your bit finds the hole that you've drilled.

So washout is essentially just imagine a bigger hole size than what you actually drilled.

Peter Brecht: That's not what I expected the answer to be, but that makes sense. Now, my question is: if your drill bit is kind of in this washout area, it can go any direction. So you're saying that it can go find the hole again? Because there's no way to really govern it in this sort of fluid area, right?

Wade: Kind of. For one thing, gravity's always helping you find that pendulum to where it's back to vertical. So that helps some. You do have a bend on your motor, and so sometimes your bit will get kind of hung up, but usually you don't have much of a hard time getting back in that old hole, especially in the vertical.

I'll tell you too, like you can—what we've done before with sidetracks, especially open hole sidetracks—imagine that you've drilled a horizontal well and you got out of zone or you had some problems. You pull back and you sidetrack. So you're essentially drilling another hole out of that previous hole.

Normally what we want to do almost every time with open hole sidetracks is you want to sidetrack to the low side of the hole. Why? Because gravity is working with you. So gravity is pushing you down. So you get your bit, you drill a trough, you build a trough, and then you drill your sidetrack going down.

Whenever you trip out the hole, you change out your assembly, you come back in, what we'll do is orient your tool. Using the MWD, we'll start pumping up, we'll orient our tool face to the low side so that we know that that bend of that motor is pointing down. And so you orient to the low side and you just push down through it, thinking that your bit and your motor is going to find that new hole and not go up into that old hole.

And then once you've tripped in, usually another stand or two, you'll pump up a survey and make sure that your surveys now match with your new hole where you want to be instead of your old hole. Because I think we've all done it before in those sidetracks where you'll accidentally track up into that old hole and you don't want to trip all the way down to the bottom. You want to know very quickly so that you can pull back and get back into the sidetrack.

Peter Brecht: Man, that's fascinating. It all makes logical sense, but walking through it and hearing how it works puts it all together. There's a lot to talk about on that stuff. It's kind of hard sometimes to hit these from a 10,000-foot perspective and every situation is a little bit different, but overall I think that answers the question.

Peter Brecht: I would love to hear more topics on what else we could get into because honestly, the downhole stuff is where it's challenging—because you can't see it. So you have to learn by either going out there, feeling it and experiencing it, or having someone walk you through it. I love that.

Wade: Experience is the best teacher for sure.

Wireline Discussion

Peter Brecht: I'm gonna give you the choice. Do you wanna talk about wireline or do you wanna talk about proppant first?

Wade: Let's talk wireline. Neither of these are like my perfect wheelhouse, so both of these sound pretty challenging for me.

Peter Brecht: Alright. So wireline—in this case, I don't really have a question. It's more I'm trying to get a feel for maybe the philosophical side of this industry. I talked to a guy yesterday on the phone and he's in his 80s. He started wireline in 1970.

He started with an independent—the guy that he worked for back in 1970 had worked for Schlumberger and then had gone off and started his own wireline company. The things that he was telling me was he spent 10 years with that guy, then he started his own company, but the majors all had patents on their wireline tools. You couldn't just go out and buy a wireline tool. You had to go build your own.

So he would go to the University of Tulsa, go through all of the patent books. He pulled the stuff out and he learned how to build them himself. The first year he built one tool and then the second year he kind of figured out what was what. And then he was able to build seven tools. So he's building all of these himself and still uses those designs to this day. He's got a company out there in Oklahoma.

His whole comment to me was—and this is what I kept asking him and he was just so generous with his time—he was telling me that the logs between... I wrote a whole article about it if you want to go read it, but in 1980 is where a lot of the logging style changed. So anything that was logged before 1980 is different and harder to read. He's like, we have all these engineers now that are trained to read the logs from 1980 to today, but anything before that they have a hard time understanding.

And my question to him was kind of a shot in the dark. I said, "Hey, don't those logs tell you where you should go drill your next hole?" And he goes, "Well, exactly." So I wanted to get some feedback from you. Is there truth to the fact that we need to be able to read those logs that are older, maybe written in a different language? How does that affect you?

Wade: I would totally agree with you. Any kind of information is good information. We need to be able to parse through it and figure out if it's applicable to us or not. But I don't think the rocks changed that much since the 1950s. So those logs would be extremely valuable.

I'm not quite sure, though, without more detailed information what you mean by the logs changed. Maybe we're talking about taking different measurements. But even then, I think gamma ray and all that stuff... Maybe the tools started to improve. I really don't know the background to what he's saying changed. Maybe it was an improvement in the functioning of the tools.

Peter Brecht: I've always enjoyed talking to people that are generations ahead of me, only because I think there's a certain type of knowledge that they have that you can learn from them and apply to your life. And I think there's also a sort of calm that they bring to the table. When you're a younger guy and something goes wrong, you throw your hands up like, "Oh man, this is the worst thing ever." And then they're like, "Dude, I've seen this 25 times. This is nothing."

Wade: Right.

Peter Brecht: I think that's a really cool thing. It's kind of like Warren Buffett. Everyone else is panicking in the market and he's like, "Yeah, okay. I've done this eight or ten times, it's not a big deal."

Wade: He's sitting on a lot of cash looking for opportunity.

Peter Brecht: I wish I knew what he was referring to so I could speak to it a little bit better, but that one I'm not 100% sure of.

Peter Brecht: One other thing that I liked—he was walking me through how in 2004, he knew the year, is when they started changing out the wireline truck. Before 2004 every tool had a different gauge in the truck, and then they started re-outfitting these trucks so that everything was on one display.

He remembers sitting there in the truck looking at this display and thinking, "Okay, I've got all these tools, I got everything running through this computer system now and I have all this data coming in, and the only way for me as a wireliner to stay ahead of this is to get really good at adopting technology."

I thought it was fascinating because I think the oil and gas industry—any industry really—we're looking at AI like, "Oh my gosh, it's going to do all these things." The reality is we've had technology advancements throughout the years. You had the computers, then the internet, then wireline trucks getting one display. I think that's probably where I enjoyed that sense of calmness. It was like, "Hey, I've gone through transitions before. None of this is really new. It's just a different speed at which we're now changing things."

I don't know. So I guess my fear of AI isn't perhaps as realistic as it should be.

Wade: It is. Like you said, we've adopted tons of technology changes in the oil field. When I was at Baker Hughes in the early 2000s, what was happening at Baker Hughes Inteq is that they were taking technology that had been present in wireline—azimuthal gamma ray, resistivity, all the measurements—and they were transforming them from what I'd say is a more benign environment.

You're connected to a power source, you're dropping it down in a well that's usually got casing in it, and they're taking that technology from the wireline side of the business, and they're trying to put it in these downhole tools where now you're not connected to a power source. You're using either batteries or you're using fluid flow to power your tools. And then now you're having to send it up, instead of it going through a cable or a wireline, you're having to send it up through mud pulse telemetry.

It was really interesting because from the Inteq side, we were like, "This is new and this is challenging." And the wireline guys were like, "Yeah, we've been looking at these for decades." So it's interesting to see that adoption. Now it's even extended even further. There's been continuous improvement in terms of how the data is sent up, the transmission rate at which it comes up, but also just the tools and the measurements and the reliability. It's definitely moving at a pretty quick pace, but it's made us better too—makes us more efficient.

Peter Brecht: That's interesting. I like how they took—it's kind of like, I always look at other industries. If I have a problem in my own industry, I like to look at other people and different things and say, "How can I take what they're doing and apply it?" So it's pretty cool that they took wireline concepts and then applied them. It makes sense, but not everyone thinks that way, where you're looking for alternatives in maybe a different department.

I did see a tech demo talking about how AI is going to be able to take patterns in every industry and then cross-examine them and look for different ways to understand information. We can do that today, but maybe not at scale as much.

Proppant/Sand Discussion

Peter Brecht: We're still going to talk about sand. You made a comment that sand's like a really big deal. And I dismissed it. I didn't really pay attention to it. Then it comes up again. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, you really have to have sand." So I wanted to maybe understand what sand is doing and why it's so important for drilling.

Wade: Sand is specifically used on the completion side—on the frac side. I do this every day, but it's part of every single well. They pump water down the hole at really high pressure. Why do they pump water? Because water is incompressible. If you put enough pressure behind it, it goes out there and it creates fractures in the wellbore.

So what you're doing is you're pumping this water at a really high rate, really high pressure to create fractures in the wellbore. Those fractures allow oil and gas to flow from the reservoir, from surrounding rock into those fractures and then up to surface where you can produce and send down the pipeline.

The challenge is—imagine this—you go down there and you pump that water. Well, you have to flow all that water back. So as you're flowing that water back, what do you think the fractures do? The fractures start to close in on themselves. They've got overburden from all the formation up above and all that stuff, so that fracture starts to close in on itself. When those fractures close in, it hinders the flow of oil and gas from the surrounding rock into your wellbore.

So what they figured out is that if you pump sand with that fluid, with that water that you're pumping downhole, that sand is transported out into those fractures. Then as you flow back your water and oil and gas, most of the sand will stay down there and it props those fractures open. And so that's why a lot of times it's not just called sand, it's called proppant—because it props those fractures open.

That maintains your pathway for oil and gas to flow from your reservoir to your wellbore and then up to surface. There's all different kinds of sand. There's 100 mesh, there's 30/50, there's... They used to even pump ceramic coated, all this stuff. There's a lot of different reasons for all the different things and some companies will prefer certain types of sand over other types. But overall, the purpose of sand is to keep those fractures open so you can keep the oil and gas flowing. Otherwise those fractures close on themselves.

Peter Brecht: So it basically—would we refer to that as improving the porosity or is it not really a porosity question? Because porosity has to do more with the natural density?

Wade: Well, no, I mean, if you think about it in terms of like the flow path, it maintains the flow path, because the thing is, once that fracture closed on itself, you've essentially got very little flow path for it to go through because it makes a pretty good seal on itself and it can kind of block that flow. But when you put sand in there, those sand grains don't fit perfectly with each other. There are still flow paths throughout all of that sand. And so that's what you need to think about—there are little porosity pockets between those sand grains that allows oil and gas to flow through there and water.

Peter Brecht: Got it. Awesome. That makes sense.

Pet Coke Innovation

Peter Brecht: The reason I'm asking about sand actually is I got a DM from an employee that works for one of the majors and he was talking about they have a new proppant that they're using called pet coke. So it's coke, which comes from a cracker in midstream, and they're using this waste byproduct to effectively create this proppant that they're now putting downhole.

What kind of blew my mind was the figures on it. This is Exxon—there's articles out there now. They're getting 7 to 18% more production in the first year than wells that they're fracking with sand only. So that's pretty sizable if you're thinking 7 to 18%.

Wade: I mean, yeah, if that's true, it's absolutely huge.

Peter Brecht: Yeah, huge. They can't use it on every well. They only use it where it makes economic sense. But the 50 wells that they did in 2024—they're going to be quadrupling that and they're going to be doing at least 200 wells this year with that.

The biggest logistic they have, and maybe a reason that it doesn't always work out in the numbers, is they have to bring this pet coke to the site on rail. They can't truck it in, which I thought was interesting. I need to dig into that more, but I guess it's really nasty stuff. It's a byproduct so it's not really fun to use, but I guess it brings some results. Pretty interesting.

Wade: I'd be interested in what's the data set? How big is it? There's probably a lot more research that they've got to do into it. But I mean, if they're looking at going to 200 wells, obviously they probably see some kind of promise there.

There's been tons of iterations. I mean, when they first started using sand in wells, or at least for a while there, they thought this Northern white sand coming from—I can't remember where it was—was crazy. And then they started running out of that and it got really expensive. And so they started sourcing local sand and they realized, "Well, hey, this is a lot cheaper and it still does a really good job. Maybe we don't need that really high grade sand and all that perfect stuff." There's been tons of iterations on it and you pump so much sand volume that those savings can really add up.

Peter Brecht: I can believe it. Again, things you don't think of—sand, oil field—but you kind of figure out that all these things work together.

Wade: Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. You're thinking about 3,000—some wells are, and I'm sure people out there are gonna say there's a lot bigger wells than this—but there's a lot of wells out there where you're pumping 3,000 pounds of sand per foot. It's crazy.

Peter Brecht: What? That's insane! My gosh, I had no idea. So it's not only packed in there, it has to be really pushed in because it's getting pressured.

Wade: Yeah, yeah, you use that fluid, you use the fluid to carry it out as far as you can into those fractures.

Peter Brecht: Right. The fracking stuff is just mind-blowing and I can't wait to talk more about frack. Well, I'll put a link to that in the show notes and then anyone that's interested can check it out.

World Famous Abbreviations Quiz

Peter Brecht: Wade, we'll end the show with our world famous abbreviations quiz. You've only missed one and it was on NORM—it was radioactive material. Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material. Yeah, that's the only one so everything else has been good.

Alright. So the first one is EMW.

Wade: Equivalent mud weight. There's a drilling one.

Peter Brecht: Yes. Perfect. This next one I can't really spell, but it's the Greek letter pi. When you see pi, what does that stand for?

Wade: 3.14... Man, I'm not sure that I've seen the Greek letter pi on a lot of drilling reports.

Peter Brecht: And I think this is a completions term, I believe, but pi stands for porosity.

Wade: I thought that was the Greek letter phi was for porosity. So like the circle with the line through it vertically?

Peter Brecht: You know what? You know what, Wade? You're totally right. Show's over. Yeah, it's spelled P-H-I. It's phi. Yeah. Dude, the show's over. We're done. You can't even quiz you proper. That's hilarious.

Alright, so the Greek letter phi stands for porosity. There you go. Wade is still two for two today.

Wade: I'm glad I caught it. I'm not a reservoir guy. I'm gonna take the win on that one, for sure.

Peter Brecht: Alright, you should. The last one is TOC.

Wade: Top of cement. Or now, that would be in drilling and completions—top of cement. In geology, that would be total organic content.

Peter Brecht: Perfect. Dude, three for three today. You're brilliant. Now you're giving me different answers from different people. So geologists are...

Wade: Yeah, yeah, I think for geologists and reservoir guys, I think TOC for them is a little bit different. I don't think I'm just making that one up. We'll have to Google that one and see if it's widely used, but I've seen that one before.

Peter Brecht: No, I think really today you're four for three. That's how I see it. You haven't missed a single one.

Wade: No, four for three, I like it. That's a good way of looking at it.

Peter Brecht: Thank you guys for listening to Local Energy this week. I hope you learned something and Wade, we'll see you next week.

Wade: All right, sounds great.