Blowout in Loving
County
It is most likely that few people know much about Loving
County in Texas. An Interstate does not
wind through the county and its main claim to fame is that it is the least
populated county in the lower 48 states. Its second claim to fame is its oil
and natural gas production. The lure of oil and gas brought me to Loving County.
In 1980, I left my teaching position in Pea Ridge,
Arkansas to pursue a degree in engineering.
After a year of studying graduate level engineering courses, a friend
contacted me. This friend was from my
undergraduate days. We were geology
majors together. My friend was in Odessa,
Texas and had developed a petroleum geology company. He offered me a starting salary of $36,000
with the tantalizing possibility of bonuses to double my income. My wife and I
ran right out and began packing the U-haul.
After working for a couple of years, the Company hit
the jackpot. We received a contract for
a series of deep gas wells for Westland Oil Development. Our contract depended on how well we did the
first well. A reputation for severe
uncontrollable blowouts hovered around this area. If we could safely bring this
well in, we would be set for a long time.
The first well was in the Haley Morrow field outside of Mentone, Texas. I must digress a little here.
Mentone is the county seat of Loving County. Mentone's population consisted of 36 people,
a very deceiving statistic. The average income of families in Loving County was
about $80,000 per year. Ninety percent of the people that live in Mentone work
for the county. Most of the money
appears to exist in the very large cattle ranches. The people refer to themselves as cattle
ranchers, but most of their income derives from oil and gas royalties. Mentone appeared in the national news in the
early 2000s when a group of Libertarians tried to take over the town. The Libertarians proposed to make Mentone a
safe place for drug dealers. They all have warrants for their arrest if they
ever return to Mentone, one of the most isolated towns you will ever see. The
land is scrub desert and requires several acres to raise one cow. One more thing about Mentone, they have no
potable water. All of the water wells either
consist of salt water or are polluted with natural gas and oil. All of Mentone’s water is trucked in from the
town of Kermit Texas.
The first well we drilled for Westland was a complete success. Normally, it takes three months to complete a
28,000 feet well, but we did the geology and engineering and were able to start
producing in less than two months. This
success set us up with Westland Oil Development. We had exclusive rights to the whole series
of wells they planned. Working for
Westland was acceptable; the company geologist and the engineers were down to
earth good Texans. The boss; however,
was something else. The owner of this
company was not a Texan or even American.
He was the nephew of Soong May-ling, also known as Madame Chiang, the
wife of the leader Nationalist Chinese movement, Chiang Kai-shek.
His American friends knew
Ling-Chieh Kung as “Louis.” He started the business using gold he
appropriated from the Chinese treasury.
Chinese communists issued a reward for his capture … dead or alive and
were willing to pay 5 million in gold. “Louis” had an underground bunker built
near Montgomery, Texas. The Bunker was a
two-story structure with 40,000 square feet built to withstand a nuclear attack
from either Russia or China and capable of housing 700 people in the event of a
nuclear strike. Louis was extremely
paranoid, which I would think is normal considering that he had a 5 million dollars
price tag on his head. Bodyguards always surrounded him. We called his bodyguards “the gang of five.”
They always carried Uzis, even though Louis was very anti-Semitic. He would on occasion fly to the well
sites. While on site, he did not speak
to anyone except those that worked directly with him. When he asked a question about an engineering
problem, he only did so through the translation of his engineer. Each of his
direct employees had a bond on them. Any employee responsible for Louis’s death
or kidnapping had a 5 million dollar reward on their head, a bond that kept his
employees loyal. Louis was married to
the 1950s actress Debra Paget. Louis suffered
a major financial setback during 1986.
His favorite president pulled the rug out from under independent
producers. Reagan removed the incentives
for domestic production, which almost wiped out the independent producers. He lost the title to the land and died in
1996. Louis was a fascist anticommunist
who backed Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover.
He disliked democracy, but he was a good Methodist.
http://www.houstonarchitecture.com/Building/2124/The-Westlin-Bunker.php
Now back to drilling the well. Drilling a 28,000 feet well is an awesome sight
the first time you watch it. The
drilling rig is approximately 140 feet high.
The drilling is accomplished with a drill bit that does not look like
the drill bits with which one commonly drill holes in wood. The bit is a cone-shaped affair with three
inspecting cones that contain teeth or buttons.
The tooth bit is used to drill rather soft rock, while the button bit is
used to drill consolidated rock. The bit
is on a drill stem that consists of drill collars and drill pipes. Drill collars are first on the drill
stem. The collars determine the weight
that can be applied to the drill bit. Typically,
there is a column of twelve drill collars, with each weighing nearly 5000
pounds. Following the drill collars are the drill pipes. A drill collar and a drill pipe are each 30
feet long. Three drill pipes per
stand. When a bit has to be changed,
usually after 90 hours, all of the drill pipes and collars are pulled out in-group
three. The process of changing out a bit
requires most of a day. A drilling mud
is circulated through to drill pipe and through holes in the bit. The drilling mud keeps the drill bit cool and
removes the pieces of rock chipped off by the bit. In a gas well, an eight-inch steel pipe a
hundred feet long carries gas from the drill mud to be burned off at the end of
the pipe. Removing this gas is important. Not removing the gas would cause the
mud to become saturated with gas and lose its density. If density is lost, the fluid and gases can
enter the well and cause a rapid expansion of the mud. This is what leads to a blowout. There are hydrologic and mechanical devices
to prevent a blowout, but sometimes, they are overwhelmed by the rapid rising
drill mud.
I was describing rock samples retrieved from the
drilling mud on a rather normal day in West Texas. Around 8 a.m., I heard what
I thought was a low flying jet. Low
flying jets are rather common in this region of Texas. All types of military jets can be seen flying
overhead and some at treetop level, if there were any trees in this part of
Texas. Actually, there is a small town
on the way to the well called No Trees. I stopped there on the way to work to
pick up some cold colas and Spam. No
Tree has no trees and few human residents.
If all the residents are as personable as the clerk at the No Trees gas
station, it is not surprising that few people live in No Trees. Limited human contact often denies people the
art of courtesy. With jets, the noise soon fades, but in this case the sound
continued. I went outside to check on my gas line. At intervals, gas is bled off and the sound
of the gas coming out the line sounds like a jet. I went out my door and looked toward my
drilling rig, and everything seemed fine. Although there was not any gas being
bled off at the gas line, the noise persisted.
I turned around and saw it, a
four hundred feet flame erupting from the well just one mile from mine. My company was conducting the geology on the
well in flames. I checked on the geologist and was relieved to learn he had escaped
without injury, but his trailer was destroyed. Within a couple of hours, the
company engineers and geologist were flying in by helicopters. The complete rig was melted down.
I remained at my well the rest of the day and when
my relief arrived, I drove out to go home. As I drove within 300 feet of the
gas flame, it felt that the heat would melt the paint on my truck. Once home, I picked up my wife and drove out
to the well site. By that time, there
were hundreds of vehicles along the road near the well. The well was about a quarter of a mile from
the road and had been burning for over five hours by that time. The flame was higher and fiercer. We drove
back to our home in Pleasant Farms just south of Odessa, Texas. That night you could see the glow from the
well. It appeared as though the sun was
setting all night long. Odessa is over a
hundred miles from Mentone. We maintained
our normal routine even though we did not drill while the other rig
burned. In the United States, an offshoot
of Red Adair’s company Boots and Coots, put out domestic well while Red Adair’s
company is international. Because of the size of this fire, the decision to
drill an offset was made. Drilling an
offset involves drilling a hole several hundred feet from the burning
well. The drill bit used in this
instance is a diamond bit. The cutting
surfaces are industrial diamonds. The
offset well is angled to intersect the hole of the burning well. Now you may be thinking that would seem to
create more problems. You might think
that the gas would go through the new hole and you would have the same
problems. The rapidly moving gas in the
original well actually creates a very low pressure in the original well so the
offset creates a powerful suction. A section of casing is placed in the hold
and cemented. Then the actual fun
begins.
Two-story high mud pumps start pumping in an oil
field mud. When I say mud, if you have
never been on an oilrig, you will probably have the wrong impression of the mud
they are using. This mud is actually
solid and consists of an iron ore ground to a fine powder mixed with
bentonite. One of the workers on the
offset showed me a bucket of the stuff being pumped into the well. He turned the bucket over and pulled the
bucket off. It just stood there. You
could kick it and it was like kicking a rock.
The stuff weighed 64 pound per gallon and was being pumped into the
original well as if it were a fluid. The flame started subsiding and finally
extinguished after about five hours. I took two weeks to drill the offset and
start pumping mud. We continued drilling on my well.
The next well I worked at was the well they drilled
at the blowout site. We did not have any
major problems and completed the well. The
final production casing was stainless steel for that well. Each casing section
was in a wooden box and each pipe was wrapped in rice paper.
You may be wondering about costs. Rig cost was $23,000 per day when everything
is going smooth. When the blowout occurred
it was costing about 3 million dollars per day, so actually the cost to put the
fire out was minimal at just over 2 million dollars.
The days in the oil fields were adventurous. On average, I drove 70 miles a day. Some days, I drove over 200 miles per
day. The pay was good but there was a
lot of stress. The IRS is rather nice to
oil people so we only had to declare 56 percent of what we earned. I paid less income tax as an engineer in West
Texas than I did as a college instructor earning one-eighth as much. I do not intend to go back to Loving County,
Texas. I have a friend who has called me
many times requesting that I operate a well with him. He always asks the stupid question, “What are
you making?” My answer is always the
same and unoriginal but I respond, “I am making business people, nurses, doctors, artists, engineers, mechanics and so on.“
©Michael L. Wright
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