Oil! A Primer on Petroleum Exploration & Production

[jayman]

Congratulations! I send my best wishes. My cats say meow

[hill]

Originally Posted by ewhanley

A little background on myself:
I have a BS in Geological Engineering from Montana Tech.

snip

Then, we in Kalispell say, "you can't be all bad".
And sorry for taking so long to say thanks for your posts.

[ewhanley]

Originally Posted by hill

Then, we in Kalispell say, "you can't be all bad".
And sorry for taking so long to say thanks for your posts.

You are quite welcome, and I do intend to wrap this up at some point. It seems that I just rarely have much time anymore between work and the new baby.

Despite the drop in oil prices, work has become unbelievably busy as of late. I've seen quite a few coworkers laid off in the last two weeks, thankfully I managed to escape that unscathed. It means a lot more work for the rest of us, but at least we still have jobs.

I wish I was in Kalispell. Alaska is great, but I'd much sooner be in Montana.

[jayman]

So how is the new critter working out?

[ronhowell]

Originally Posted by dogfriend

A lot of things seem very simple when you don't have to concern yourself with the details of how to make it happen.

My-oh-my, isn't that the truth! Which is why reading this thread is such a revelation for me, since it is so completely out of my field of expertise.

Great work, Mr. Hanley.

[jayman]

Everything seems very easy if you keep repeating to yourself "it's magic!" Now try to work out the Calculus behind the engineering, and heavy drinking soon becomes an option

BTW: I would like to hear more about the new critter

[ronhowell]

One of the things that has always intrigued me is the magnitude of the twist that must occur in the drilling string when drilling at the enormous depths that appear common today (5000 ft+).
But perhaps this is avoided by somehow isolating the drilling bit mechanism from the total string length.
Anyone know?

[jayman]

The drill pipe is pretty heavy duty to withstand the twisting, and the drill rig operator is taught to watch the gauges to make sure the limits are not reached. Still, a string can be snapped

Its a giant PITA to try to recover a broken drill string

[ronhowell]

Originally Posted by jayman

The drill pipe is pretty heavy duty to withstand the twisting, and the drill rig operator is taught to watch the gauges to make sure the limits are not reached. Still, a string can be snapped

Its a giant PITA to try to recover a broken drill string

I can well (no pun intended!) believe that; this stuff is really heavy engineering. But the drilling string has to undergo twist, I just wondered what the magnitude of the twist is in degrees with drilling depth. Obviously, it is some function of the drilling string diameter and length, plus some other variables like temperature perhaps.

There is a pretty good summary of oil wells and production at

Oil well - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Oil_well

, in particular the section on well abandonment and factors affecting the economic limit of production from a well.

[jayman]

Yes, the string is engineered/expected to undergo a certain amount of twist/torsion. My involvement in drill ops is very limited, but if you wish I could dig up appropriate technical material