Science in Action: Drilling for Oil (1956)

years ago this is the sort of thing that happened quite often especially when some oil Seeker happened to stumble upon a new pool now such occurrences were very dramatic but unfortunately many millions of barrels of oil were lost never to again be recovered now today such occurrences are not very common because drilling for oil has become a highly scientific operation and to tell us of the modern techniques in this field both in the matter of discovering oil deposits as well as bringing the oil to the surface we have invited as our special guest on science and action Mr Howard G Vesper vice president of the Standard Oil Company of California welcome once again to science and action Mr bford thank you Earl I'm delighted to be on the show and I think I heard you mention a moment ago the term oil pool we might start by just saying that I believe most people have somewhat of a misconception of what an oil pool below ground is most people think it's a reservoir or lake of oil something like this with rock above and rock below well actually it's something quite different we might visualize it by taking this little cylinder of small grains of sand imagine that these are cemented together with many pores in between in which the liquid is is retained and we can show how the crude oil is actually kept in the pores of this Rock by pouring the liquid in you notice that it fills the pores very very easily this is what the oil man refers to as an oil pool now according to the best opinion oil comes from the decomposition of very small organisms both plants and animals most of these are too small to see but if we put them on a slide and place them under the microscope we find that there are all sorts of beautiful forms especially in these diones which we see all of these plants and animals decayed to make chemical substances and finally to make oil which is accumulated at the bottom of the ocean oceans and trapped by layers of sand and mud gradually over the geologic times the sand would Harden into a rock which we call Sandstone which looks something like this and the mud overlaying the sand would finally Harden into a rock known as Shale which looks like this now if we were to make a very thin section of this sandstone and place it again on our slide and put it into a projector we would find that there were many spaces and pores and uh different sorts of holes connecting the various areas in that those are very important Earl because those are the holes about the diameter of a human hair through which the fluids flow and as a result we call this sort of rock this sandstone a permeable Rock now by contrast with that the Shale if we were to make a section of that a very thin section and examine it either under the projector the microscope we would find that the holes of pores were so small that fluid couldn't go through it that's right and for that reason we call this kind of a rock imper able however during the thousands of centuries that these rocks were being formed saltwater and oil were forced into the pores of the sandstone and gradually accumulated in this rock we can illustrate that by using a common sponge which is soaked up here a lot of water and as the oil and the Rock were being soaked up I think you can imagine that the oil being lighter would tend to travel toward the top of the Sandstone or the sponge well coming back to our Sandstone core here again the oil would come up here and then it would run into the Shale couldn't get through of that and then we would have it trapped at this point that's right and we can illustrate that perhaps by using a little sponge rubber model If This Were A cross-section of the Earth's surface the black part might represent the Shale or the impermeable Rock and the section with the diagonal lines would be the Sandstone impregnated with oil now over the geologic centuries the Earth's surface might tend to buckle something like this and if this were to happen I think you can see that the oil would would tend to migrate up in here from both sides would be held in by the impermeable Shale on the top and by salt water on both sides here and we would have an oil trap this is what the geologist calls an anticline now in addition to these anticlines you have such things as faults and pinch outs both which hold oil in addition to the anticline yes we do but the big problem is still how to locate the oil it's trapped down there hundreds of thousands of feet below the surface now one of the ways that this might have been done in the early days was by means of doodle Bugs or perhaps even divining rods now according to the best technique a divining Rod is held balanced in about this position person walks around and then at the proper point uhoh the rod starts to dip I guess we should drill for oil here right hard well I wish it were that simple Earl and we'd certainly like to find oil in San Francisco well actually in your work you use a variety of scientist such as geologists physicist mathematicians chemists and many others to determine just where you're going to drill Earl finding oil these days is a very highly scientific sort of a thing and we use all of these people that you mentioned we generally start with a geologist and if you can imagine this as representing a Terrain which we think has some oil possibilities the geologist would be the first one to examine it he'd look at it with relation to known geologic structures places where we' already found oil or new oil to exist and he would determine that it was a likely spot and then when he had determined that he'd call for the help of the geophysicist and in turn the seismic crew who would uh explore a ridge like this for example uh with the seismograph now this is your crew out in the field uh that's right and uh you'll see them they actually put a small charge of dynamite down a little hole and create a very miniature localized sort of an earthquake U there it goes and that set sound waves to going off that go down below the ground and are recorded on something that we call a seismogram that looks like this and this seismogram of course now if I understand this properly your instrument is set up here and your charge is also set off at this point yes and this is a time interval now out to here would be about 1 second now I noticed that there are some different types of marks through here what do those indicate well these are the record of the reflections of the sound waves that have been set off at the surface of the Earth gone down a certain number of hundreds or thousands of feet and encountered different sorts of rock formations and been reflected back to the surface and thus measured as these wavy lines you say Earl you can explain this principle I think very simply if you just imagine that you and I were standing on the edge of a canyon and suppose we wanted to find out how far it is across to the other side of the canyon we would shout perhaps and we'd measure the exact length of time it took our voice to travel from one side to the other now we know that uh sound travels about 1100 ft a second in air and so by measuring the time it takes our voice to return we' know just how wide the Sandstone is or the canyon is and it's the same principle exactly that we use in the seismograph in measuring subsurface formation in other words the rate with which the shock waves go through the various types of material in the earth determines what sort of material you have there that's right for example Sandstone we know that sound travels at the rate of about 8,000 ft a second and other rocks likewise have different uh rates of transmission and so knowing that as we come back to our seismogram here we can interpret this by seeing that these various sections where there are unusual reflections of sound from these rock formations deep in the earth me a special sort of a rock formation and this AIDS the geologist to tell whether or not this is a likely region in which to find oil despite the fact that this seismograph is the best way you have so far of determining where oil is still you can't be absolutely sure that it's there until you have put down a test hole to make certain well it's an old saying in the oil business orl that oil is where you find it and you certainly are right we have to drill in order to do that now on this uh Model D how would you go about that this little model incidentally was made by one of our young producing people in our Standard Oil Company of California producing Department Mr Don Ranken I think it's a very nice model the Derek up here I think is familiar to most people who've been out in the oil fields and it's used to raise and lower the drill pipe on this block which goes up and down in the DK actually the drill pipe we use weighs about 25 lb a foot and it's about 4 1/2 in in diameter well now in other words you attach the pipe one on the other and they keep going down continuously into the ground that's right Earl each section of drill pipe is about 30 ft long and we screw these together and since some of these oil wells go down as much as 20,000 ft you can see that there are hundreds of sections of drill pipes screwed together now down at the bottom in order to do the real work we have a bit which actually chews away at the Rock and cuts away and actually makes the hole I was surprised in finding out that this diamond bit has a value of some $4,000 it doesn't look like it does it but that's right this is worth about $4,000 and I think you can see why if we look at it carefully here because these little individual chips all around the face are real diamonds they're very hard this is a special kind of a bit that we call a core bit and it's used to rotate and cut away a section of the rock through which we're drilling the section might look like this this happens to be a core sample of a Shale this is brought to the surface and again used by the geologist to determine the kind of formation in which we're drilling well this bit uh is of another type this is the one you commonly use this is the more common type this actually rotates screwed onto the drill pipe and rotates thus it's a wicked sort of looking thing when you look at it closely these teeth very hard alloy steel are what actually cut away the chips of rock where does Mr Kelly come into this Kelly's another famous oil field name and what actually happens is that this bit is attached to the bottom of the drill pipe the drill pipe is screwed together for some thousands of feet and if we can go back to our Derek here comes up through a rotating table in the Derek floor and attaches on to a square pipe it's called The Kelly and so you when you drill you have a whole sequence of things happening you have the drill table turning the Kelly and the Kelly turning the drill pipe down below ground the drill pipe turning the bit and the bit cutting away the rock I know that sounds a little bit like a lyric from this song Old McDonald had a farm but that's the way it works certainly does well now I have a question on these types of uh shafts that you make in your grilling on this model I can well understand this type of a shaft but this one over here with all of these Contours on the side looks a little bit different why all the bulges well Earl imagine that this is a cutaway section down some thousands of feet below the ground the shaft on the right is the kind we like to drill in the center you will see these 30ft sections of drill pipe represented here tied together now in order to drill a straight hole this should be in tension so it should be a a pull on both ends and if I start this drill pipe to moving you'll notice that the one on the Right Moves very smoothly because it is in tension the one on the left because it's it's not properly intentioned is loose and acts like sort of a cork screw and the net result is that we got a very irregular hole with these bulges uh a very inefficient kind of a hole now way down at the bottom of course is this drilling bit some of which we just examin but what about the chips that are left in there uh do they stay there or do you take them out well that involves something we didn't mention earlier and that's a drilling mud now there's a very special kind of a mud made when we're drilling these Wells it's on the surface of the Derek there's a mud tank and mud pumps and it's actually pumped down from the surface of the ground through the middle of this drill pipe right down to the bottom of the hole and comes out of the bit and just where you're pointing over there is the eyes in the bit where the mud comes out and it picks up then the The Rock chips the cuting and brings them back up around the outside of the drill pipe to the surface where they can be removed and they look something like this when we recover these Rock chips these of course are also very interesting to the geologist because they're another indication of the kind of rock through which we're Drilling very nice but one of the most interesting things that you've turned up that to the marine biologist would be this sort of a core with uh clams in it clams that resembl forms that live today along the Pacific coast well I can see why because of your Marine background you're interested in this Earl and you're quite right the geologist always looks at these cores for marine fossils or evidences of marine life because he knows the kind of marine life that is most apt to be associated with oil and so by examining these cores he can tell whether again he's on the track of something that's likely to have an oil formation now let me set up a special problem for you Howard we have one of these anacin we know there there oil there because we sent a test uh uh drilling down and we're already now to start production how can we control the prod production just happened to have another model here Earl that'll illustrate that good you'll recall that we mentioned earlier this geologic formation known as an anticline if you'll just imagine that we have sliced right down through one of these through the middle this is the representation of the model actually this model was prepared by the Richfield oil company and it's through their courtesy that we are able to use it this evening it will illustrate how an oil field actually works down below here on the bottom is a formation that has salt water in it here is the oil sand and you know notice the darker color showing the presence of oil and up at the top this clear section A very important part is where the gas is accumulated that's called the gas cap now gas of course would normally be in solution with the oil so this must be the ex above that yes and it's a very important thing because the pressure exerted by this gas cap forces the oil down in this direction and up an oil well and this represents the oil well that we have and we're going to demonstrate how it actually flows I think we can also show that with a bottle of this type of excel water the carbon dioxide in here notice what happens you press on it and out comes the liquid for is exactly the same Earl and um if I open up this well which has been drilled into the oil sand I think you'll see it start flowing you'll also notice several other things you'll notice that the oil level is dropping here as the gas pressure Works in this direction and forces the oil on up the well now this would go on for some little time Earl until the pressure in the gas cap were depleted and then we'd have to provide some way to help the oil get to the surface we would do that um by adding a pump up here and I think you've all seen the the pump in the oil fields it goes up and down this way which helps to lift the oil from here to here after the gas pressure has gone down quite a bit I believe you mentioned earlier today the amount of recovery that you could get by this method from a normal field would be what about 40% of the total oil there unfortunately that's about all we would normally get out of the field we never can get all the oil and I'm going to go back to the sponge to illustrate why that is here's a sponge again soaked with water and if I squeeze this rather easily we get out the easy 40% of the oil then if I squeeze it quite a bit harder you'll see we get a lot more water out of it but no matter how hard I squeeze you're never going to get all of the water out of that sponge and so in an oil field some of the oil is always going to stay in the rock formation well since 2/3 of all the energy used in the United States comes from petroleum or petroleum products it seems to me vitally important that we get every bit of this oil out here that we can you're exactly right Earl and to do that we resort to what we call conservation practices more efficient operational methods it's a very important thing to all of us and I'd like to illustrate two methods by which can do this with this model now you recall I said that the gas pressure gets depleted up in this section yes well I think we can help nature out a bit by replenishing that gas pressure and so the model illustrates what would happen if we had drilled a well into this part of the sand and we're going to inject High Press gas I'd like to have you just open the valve and we will actually that's enough I think inject some high pressure gas and I'll open the well again and we'll see what happens you'll notice that there's a very large flow of oil further down here and a considerable increase in production into our surface tank now if you'll cut that one off the other way of doing this is to start from the bottom end and here we can exert more pressure on this end of the oil field by adding to the water pressure so we'll drill a well down here and add water under pressure to force the oil up toward the well and again to increase our production so I'll add a little water here under pressure and again open up our producing well and you'll notice a good bit more production and more oil being produced from this sand so that we get a much higher Total Recovery than we would otherwise get this is called water injection incidentally and the earlier procedure is called gas injection now the 40% figure that you can recover from a normal um well that would be increased by how much if you use this water injection method plus the gas injection method oh I think we could get up to about 7 5% well that seems like the logical thing to do how does it work in prod in in actual practice well I wish it were quite as simple as it sounds but it gets complicated because people come into the picture and if we had for example three owners of this oil field suppose we had Mr a owning this left hand section Mr B owning the center section over to here and Mr C owning the right hand section we'd have something like this Mr a and Mr C might like to do these recovery methods this water injection and gas injection but all they do would be to drive more oil up Mr be's well and so they chances are they wouldn't do that instead they would probably drill an additional Wells here and over here into the oil sand and we'd get more oil all right temporarily but in the long run we'd lose oil because the pressures in the field would would be depleted and it would be an inefficient way to operate the field well how do you get around that problem by doing what's called unitization This is a procedure whereby all the owners in the field combine their interest in the field and arrange to have it produced efficiently just the right number of Wells the right spacing the right pressure maintenance right gas injection water injection so we get the maximum possible recovery out of the field it's a fine thing to do because each owner in the long run uh fares better and certainly the public does too well now I have seen some figures recently to the effect that oh in 15 years we would use up all of the oil resources in North America how do you feel about that that's a common figure ear and don't be misled by it because that assumes that we don't find any more oil that all of the methods for improved location of oil and improved recovery of oil don't amount to anything and a lot of other uh inappropriate facts what actually that means is simply that we have a good backlog of oil uh with us at the present time now in this matter of expiration and getting new oil fields I followed with considerable interest this offshore work that you've been doing and I wonder perhaps you could go into it just what's involved in that I'd like to Earl actually we start out in offshore drilling in exactly the same way as if we were Drilling onshore that is we locate a likely likely place we do that by using the geologist by using the geophysicist the seismic crew and just the same manner as we've described whether it be on water or land and then once we've got a likely spot we can do either of two things we can either drill from the land or we can actually go out in the water and drill the first of these we have Illustrated here uh it's a kind of an unusual procedure this little diagram shows the Shor line off here and a well on the shore starting out here and coming down perhaps a couple of thousand feet and then at an appropriate depth we put a wedge down at one side of the of the drill pipe and actually turn the drill pipe in a slanting direction like this it's called whip stocking and we drill some thousands of feet out here below the surface of the water and under the water and if we're lucky as this uh chart would indicate we are we hit an anticline and we have an oil field down here now if your oil field is too far out in the water to do this then you have to go to this other method which is relatively new and how does this uh very interesting platform work also relatively expensive Earl we can either go out in the water and drill an island and put a DK on it and actually drill from it but more commonly if you go out in the water you do something like this we drive piles down at the actual bottom of the ocean and build up a platform such as this model shows the water level might be about here 50 or 60 ft to the platform to allow the waves to break under the platform incidentally we can only go into water about 100 ft Deep by using this sort of a method and on top of the platform we have a Derek of the same kind we've described uh we have the usual things around the bottom of the Derek the drill pipe Crews quarters over here and then to really make it modern you've shown a helicopter to take the crew to and from their Shore quarters well I'd like to ask you one thing now Howard how is this going to increase our available supply of petroleum well we are sure that it will Earl because we know there's a lot of oil offshore but it uh it's going to come a little bit hard as I mentioned it's expensive to do this we don't know how much oil we can find but I'm sure we will find quite a little bit but I think the combination of things like this exploration in new places around the world improved scientific tools for finding oil better recovery methods all of these things are going to combine to ensure that we have a good backlog of oil for a great many years and so don't worry about this 15-year period ear we're going to be using a lot more oil by then but I'm sure this oil industry of ours is going to be able to keep Pace with it and keep a good Reserve well that certainly is a very very reassuring note and Mr hard vper I want to thank you for coming to science and action to tell us about the problems in the oil field thank you Earl have enjoyed it now I'll be back in just a moment with the animal of the week our animal of the week is the kingu and one of the nicest and one of the most strangest animals we've had on the program he's very much interested in his name sign here he's a special of Don mcne now Don um this is an animal that comes out only at night is that right uh strictly nocturnal uh doctor and strictly arboreal which means of course that he stays in the trees his whole life perhaps you could pick him up by this Tail as you were demonstrating a little bit earlier yes uh this is uh unusual for a member of the raccoon family it's the only member of the raccoon family with a preh Hansel tail which means of course that he can hang by it uh doesn't bite doesn't scratch makes a very good pet makes a wonderful children's Pet that's right uh he has a very thick heavy fur here it's virtually impossible for fleas to live in there it's so thick and tight oh you little rascal he likes that I wonder if we can feed him something here you have something there we can feed him and we'll see how he reacts when the food comes over here this is a can of dog food which is his Staple in his diet he also uh rates a quarter of a an apple or some grapes and some orange uh anything we happen to have around the house that it right come on out there kinky you little rascal well let's see these fellas live in Mexico and down into Central America and into South America yes this particular model is from Peru now he is the cutest model I've seen in many a day uh this is about a full grown animal yes i' I'd say he was 8 months old which means that he's matured as far as size goes and uh he has a honey colored Underside there which is quite beautiful too bad we don't have colored te hungry this he wants that food again doesn't he right it holds on here you can really hold on with everything about how much would he weigh about what a couple pound 3 lb the outside how long has he had him Don we've just had him a couple months he's right out of the jungles and the day we took him out of the crate he was just as gentle and friendly as he is now now your youngsters play with him all the time do they yes all the kids in the neighborhood of course play with him and uh if he didn't sleep so much in the daytime they'd have more fun with him but he really comes alive at night does he take the house apart at night well he takes the pictures off the walls oh he does oh he is really active I've never seen anything like this before well for a member of the raccoon family I'll say this most most certainly is the best one to be found in South America there's no question about that we've had KO mondy on before and as they're youngsters of course they're very nice but they can't compare with this well Don I hope you'll keep us informed as to how your little rascal does and let us know in the future you bet I will now this is one type of energy that you are seeing demonstrated here chemical energy there are various types of energy and on our next program we will look into the problems of work energy and power when our special guest will be Professor Harvey E White of the University of California hope that you'll find to be with us then thanks a lot