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Welcome to Conventionally Uncouth with Reed Goodman. The show that gives the mic to the men and women who’ve been drilling, pumping, producing, and wildcatting for decades, long before shale. This show catalogs knowledge, shares stories, and reminds us: there was a life before shale. And there will be one after. Stories straight from the oilfield, real insights, lessons learned, and (probably) a healthy pour of whiskey.
0:00 I can't believe that it's -
0:14 Good morning. How you doing, Rhee? This is Blake. I don't even know your last name. You're in my phone as Blake. Yeah, Mosely. Mosely. I'll sell you a strong name. Blake Mosely here.
0:27 We're going to talk mud this morning. Yes, sir. Everything mud. Maybe. Well, talk about anything you want. Yeah. Yeah, it is my podcast. It is your podcast. Just like Steve Rinella, right?
0:39 Yeah. I mean, I'll talk about duck hunting the whole time if you want So we wanted to do this in the duck blind. We did. And we couldn't make it happen. We tried. We tried actually last week.
0:50 Was it this week before Thanksgiving? I had my boat hooked up to my truck and my decoys in my boat and gas in the boat and my dog in the kennel in the back of the truck for almost four days straight.
1:03 And I only made it to the duck blind once in those four days. You aren't living, right? I had a well go down. My wife got mad at me one day. The kid ended up in the hospital. It's like, man, I
1:13 just couldn't make it to the dug line. This kid, all right. He's good. Good. The wife's getting mad at you. That's a daily occurrence in my house, so. She's sweet, but she can be honorary.
1:26 Yeah, we wouldn't want her any other way. No, not at all. Well, once again, getting back to this little setup you've got here, this is great. Yeah, it's pretty cool It's nice they let us use
1:37 it. I couldn't afford all this fancy equipment. No, I'm afraid to move. I don't want to break something. Like Big Brother watching you from over there and over that, I don't even know which
1:49 camera's looking at me right now. I'm looking at nine cameras right now. It's pretty cool, it's pretty cool. I like what they've got going on here. And we are fortunate they let us use this place
1:58 to have a voice, teach each other some stuff, maybe teach somebody else something, somewhere else.
2:07 I'm gonna interview you first. Oh, what's your story?
2:12 Hmm, where do I start? 1993 in the back of a Lexus South South Calhoun County Good night. No, I actually I don't know where that spot was. I don't know if I want to know where that spot was
2:28 No, you said but you you came from the downhole tour. Yeah side. Yeah downhole tools and then Start of my operating company in 2019. Okay, and as I've I've told a number of people on here I
2:42 Figured if I was gonna be a better operator and needed to know the rocks better. Mm-hmm I really needed to understand the rocks because that's where it starts and it ends, right? Yeah, either you
2:50 have the the porosity and the permeability and the hydrocarbons present
2:59 Where you don't Well, I guess of all those the permeability we can create any permeability we want at this point, but um So, you know, just studying all that.
3:05 And then here lately, you know, I've got a couple of prospects that I want to drill and that I'm working on in hand. One of them, there was a, I would call it maybe a discovery well.
3:20 There was a well-drilled with lime-based mud. Okay. And this geologist is telling me, you know, lime-based mud, nobody's used that since the '70s and I don't know why this old man drilled it that
3:30 way, but it washed all our cuttings. We didn't get, you know, really good samples because that lime-based mud kind of acts as a detergent, you know, and so you really don't get good mud logs out
3:40 of that. And so, and I got to thinking, there's one thing I, there's a lot of things I don't know a lot about. You and me both. But like as I move from, I'm pretty solid on the production side,
3:53 I'm kind of rickety on the completion side, but I think I can hold my own in a conversation. As I move into the drilling side,
4:00 I don't know much very well And the more I think about it, the more I realize how. complex it is? Yeah. Right? Or can be? Well, it's a science, just like any other science, you know, we're
4:13 we're every year, we're having breakthroughs, we're learning more, we're getting better at what we do. Yeah. Yeah, not that we haven't done things successfully in the past. Yeah. But it's just
4:23 like any other science, it's it's continuously evolving. And that's that's being spurred on by, you know, other other segments of the industry, such as, you know, the tools, you know, we're
4:38 the bits, you know, we have better bits now, and we're drilling much faster. So we've had to, on the mud side, we've had to, we've had to move along with them. Yeah. And and find our little
4:50 place. And try to keep up. Well, definitely try to keep up. Yeah. That's one of the things that always frustrated me on the production side is like, you know, the drilling guys get all these
4:60 awards for how fast they can drill. Then when it gets all the way down to production, it's like, Dude, Like, I, I have no option but to jet pump or gas lift this. Like I will never get a rod
5:12 pump in here. Um, you know, and so it's, it's, it's frustrating when those, uh, objectives aren't aligned, but yeah, drill in super speed. And I've been on, I've taken part in more than
5:27 three dozen wells, maybe 300 wells where it's, oh, check this out We just drilled 430 foot an hour and we got this well down in five days. Um, but what it doesn't say that what that record didn't
5:42 touch on was it took them three days to strip out of the whole afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, that's, that's, hey, you know, people, people have their, their, their matrix that they try
5:54 to, that they try to do their job in. Yep. Yep. Yeah. They have a certain KPIs They get rewarded at certain points of the well's life. Yeah. Right. And, uh, and so everybody's trying to do
6:05 their job to get that rewarding and hit that, that KPI that they're measured on. Yeah. Right. And, um, but we kind of skipped over you. Blake Mosley. Yes, sir. Strong name. Strong name.
6:19 Strong man. Yeah. I don't know if you're stronger than a friend Craig. I would do this. Well, Craig's, Craig's a little weird. He's crossfit, dude. He's like, those guys are sorry, Craig.
6:29 Those guys are like pretty muscle. Yes.
6:33 You know, God built my body to move heavy things. Not to move far distances. So I'm not a runner, but no Craig, Craig's a good guy. You know, I've been working with him now for a couple of
6:49 years,
6:52 you know, he's, he's quirky. Yeah, but I think that's kind of what makes him fun. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, he'll, he'll be the first to say. He'll be the first to say, Hey, I'll help you
7:05 hide a body. Yeah.
7:09 Yep. So your background, you've been in mud for a while, where'd you start out? Yeah, so Baker Hughes hired me right out of college back in '06. So I spent about 15 years with Baker Hughes.
7:23 Okay. 14 years with Baker Hughes. And since then, you know,
7:30 started off offshore, working from
7:36 the bar drugs all the way up to deep water. When the Macondo blew up, the BP incident, I was sent out to Bakersfield, California, worked in Ventura, worked the West Coast for a bit. And then,
7:49 you know, I'm a Texas boy, grew up just south of here in Galveston County. Okay. And when the Eagleford started popping, it was just, hey, this is my way to get back to Texas. Yeah And, you
8:02 know, nothing wrong with - Nothing wrong with California, but. Yeah, but a lot of things are on the killing board. You know, and also, you know, if you've, I've said this before, if you've
8:14 ever spent much time in Bakersfield, California, you'll really come to appreciate Midland, Texas. Really? Yeah. Never been out there. Yeah, it's all right. There's just not much
8:26 there. It's Midland, Texas, just on the West Coast. Yeah. I can see that It's a little bigger town. A lot more G-Wagons. A whole lot more G-Wagons. Yeah, I can see that. It's not bad, but,
8:41 you know, got back here, settled down in Corpus, you know, mostly over the last, well, I'm gonna say partially over the last, what, seven years, you know, I've now moved, I'm with a company
9:01 now, Genesis fluids. great company,
9:05 but doing both conventional and unconventional stuff, just my placement and where I am geographically, it's easy to
9:19 pick up the conventional work where we're at, because there's just a lot more of it,
9:27 and that's what I've been focusing on, spent a little bit of time on the completion fluid side. Okay. And I've done some of that and continue to do some of that. But mostly, you know, mud down
9:40 here in South Texas, done some stuff up in up in the Utica and the Marcellus. But does that change much region by your region? Yeah, it changes a lot. It changes a lot Just, you know,
9:56 you know, for example, before before we get too deep. Yeah, some Some folks will know what we're talking about a month. Some folks won't. Yeah. So.
10:09 Kind of give a brief overview of what mud is. Yeah, it's like the longer I've thought about it, the more complicated I can make it in my mind in the, at the end of the day, it's super simple.
10:22 Like you
10:25 can make it as complicated as you want. Yes. Right, but mud is doing, in a drilling aspect, mud is doing
10:31 two or three things for us. Or six things, it is why. It will be doing six, right? Okay, so for me as a down-hole tool guy, mud or any kind of fluid we put in the hole is a well-controlled
10:44 barrier for me. It is. So I want, the thing I've always been concerned with is whatever fluids we're putting in the way we talk about mud, we're talking about fluids we're putting in the hole,
10:53 right? Whatever fluids we put in the hole, whatever mud needs to be heavy enough. to control whatever pressure we might encounter down in the subsurface. Correct. You know, from the tool guy
11:08 side, that's what I'm concerned with, right? Is that it needs to be heavy enough to be my well-controlled barrier. Yes. But there's so many other things like removing drill cuttings, removing.
11:21 Like, well, I guess as a tool guy, I've seen it on the completion side too, right? Where we're drilling out plugs, we want to carry those plug parts back to surface But like, those are the two
11:29 parts that I've really been concerned with. So mud needs to be weighted and heavy enough to control whatever pressure we're gonna encounter. It also needs to have enough viscosity or velocity to
11:41 carry some cuttings out of the well. Yeah, you have a yield point of the mud. Yeah, have some thickness to it. Yep, yep. You know, there's also the, you know, it's basically used as a
11:54 hydraulic fluid as well with the, with the tools down hall Oh.
11:60 The main aspects, it cools the bit. You know, there's a host of secondary and tertiary things that drilling fluids does. But, you know, for the layman out there, a drilling fluid, it can be,
12:17 you know, anything, any liquid from a fresh water to a brine to an invert, like a de-solar synthetic. Okay The first aspect of it, or the
12:33 main aspect of it, is to create pressure, you know, a hydrostatic torrier, we can push against the formation, and we can weight that fluid up to whatever we need to, up to about 20, 21 pounds,
12:47 to push against the formation, so the hole doesn't collapse on you. Oh, okay. Yeah, and then, you know, you wanna push enough into it that you're keeping it open, but. You don't want to, you
12:60 don't want to frack the well either. So there's a, there's a fine line you walk and then, you know, obviously, you know, it's a, it's a hole. You're digging a hole. You got to get those
13:09 cuttings out. So you, you know, that fluid is the mechanism that carries the cuttings out. That's, I didn't think about it for like whole stability. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's probably the
13:21 biggest aspect. It holds your whole open of whole stability and well-bore stability. I thought it was just to carry all the junk to the surface. No No, you know, and there's a fine line. You
13:30 walk there because, uh, as I said, you know, you want to have enough pressure pushing against that well-bore that nothing can seep in or fall in. Okay. But you, you can be overburdened or, you
13:47 know, you'll break, you'll break open the formation. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Like this, well, I was talking about with the line-based mud. It was a, it was a wildcat and they had no idea what they
13:57 were going to do. or what they were going to see down there. So they drilled everything like super
14:04 heavy and they lost fluid almost the entire time. Yeah. They were pumping LCM continuously to try to like get some kind of returns, but they pretty well just like lost circulation the entire time
14:16 they were drilling because they were scared they were going to hit a gas pocket and everything was going to come to see them. They were overbalanced and they were they were too overbalanced. Yeah,
14:23 absolutely You know, and I don't, so the lime aspect is they drilled it with a lime mud. I'm not sure that
14:34 the lime mud probably didn't didn't do any good or harm them at all. It was the mud weight. Gotcha. That was pushing back. They broke down the formation on their own. They were all intents and
14:48 purposes fracked into that formation. Might as well have thrown a hand grenade down there. Yeah. And all that skin damage around there So you can't really even evaluate out of the well port at that
14:56 point. Yeah, and then from the geologist aspect, I've never looked at that. So I wouldn't know what the,
15:08 I'm saying it washed the cuttings or whatnot. If they use the lime mud, a lime mud is, it's a calcium mud. Okay. So
15:18 lime is what, C-A-H-O-2. It's calcium hydroxide. And there's two types of lime muds There's a lime and a chip. Okay. And a chip mud is C-A-Cousine something, calcium-C-A-S-O-4. Okay.
15:40 But in this aspect, you know, so it makes sense if, what were they doing in the limestone?
15:52 Yeah, I don't know, I don't know what it was I'm. Let's see, they went through all the same Permian strata. They went through Wolf Camp. They went through Abbo. They went through Yaso. Strong.
16:01 They had all
16:06 your standard Permian strata. Okay, so - In there. No, I don't think, no, once again, I could pull recaps and I could see what the offsets have done. Yeah. But in this instance, it was most
16:19 likely they overburdened that formation and they broke it down themselves. That's the fun part about this wealth. There are no offsets I'm so excited about it. I'm so excited about it. I'm gonna
16:28 talk less about it because I shouldn't talk more about it. So if I start talking about it again, tell me to just shut up for a minute, all right? Well, you know, you can typically, there's no
16:38 offsets in, there's nothing within five miles or there's nothing within 55 miles. 55 miles. Okay. So we're like loving county or we're something way out there, right? It's like a million acres
16:51 in this basin. It's a lot of acres.
16:56 There are some CO2 wells,
17:01 45 miles away. Okay. The closest production is probably 90 miles. Okay. And there's been less than a dozen wells drilled in the entire basin.
17:15 And of those, the most recent one to be drilled was maybe 2002. Okay. And then before that it was like 1984, 1982 So it's like there is little to no data. Pretty much a true wildcat here. Yeah.
17:28 Which is what's so fun about it. Those are fun. But then they did some dumb stuff. So I'm like pretty much, I'm just gonna have to drill another wildcat to like really get the data. I mean,
17:35 there's some, don't get me wrong. We did collect some data for it, you know? But there's a lot of data that was,
17:46 I don't know,
17:48 dirty data, bad data. Like they started losing really bad on the wolf camp and they turn the shakers off and started. pumping nut plugs that try to get some. They pulled the shaker screens to put
18:00 as much LCM in there as they could. And not lose it over the shaker screens. And then they didn't never put the screens back in or turn it back on. So when you look at your cuttings, the amount of
18:11 granite wash that you have from that point on just gets larger and larger and larger. 'Cause it's never getting out of your mud system. There's nothing to separate that out. And so then that
18:22 compound of the problem and they kept drilling more and more and more overbalanced because they weren't getting their cuttings out of their fluids. And they never built a proper filter cake. They
18:31 never, yeah. Yeah. So it was a little bit of a compounding issue, which then like, so I'm looking at it. I'm like, well, from the wolf camp down, like,
18:42 can I trust any of this? You know, like when it says that it's 50 granite, I'm like, that's from all the wash above it. Yeah, well, you can work off of what you know they did wrong. Right So,
18:54 you know, in. in the future. I don't know what that, what that mud weight was, what their, uh, or how much they were overbalanced, but the mud log says it was 99 in 99 out the entire mud log.
19:07 I was like, that's bullshit. That didn't happen. That didn't happen. I mean, the cuttings alone are going to, are going to wait it up. Yeah. Well, that, that's where you start from then.
19:17 You, one, you, if I were in this, if I were writing this program and I were researching this well and, you know, you have to give variables, you have to give options. But we know, and, you
19:35 know, first and foremost, you got to let that well tell you what it wants. Say no, you know, you spun in with a spun mud, you get through the water tables, you set casing, you drill out from
19:46 there, and I'm pretty sure that, you know, they didn't start off with a 99. I hope they didn't Yeah. you drill out with a nine one nine two and then let the well tell you what it wants. Is that
20:00 right? Yeah, and 'cause we can wait up on site. It's not like we order out specialty, specialty weights. You know, we can start with the fresh water and. And if you start gaining mud back to
20:14 your pits, then you know that there's an influx of something you need to wait up. You're underweighted and you'll wait up. Yeah. You know, in the same sense though, you know, they use the
20:24 lime-based system. I would probably come in with a dispersed system like a leg or even, you know, a polymer system to just try to start building a wall cake in that membrane right away. So, you
20:42 know, when you drill well, the in a water-based mud, a conventional well, the biggest aspect, you know, besides weight, but you're trying to build. a wall cake. And what that wall cake is,
20:56 is it's a membrane. Okay. That, that keeps fluid intrusion from getting into the formation. Okay. And that's where, that's where geologists, you know, are really, because they, they need to
21:11 see that, they need to see that info. So you're not wanting any of your drilling fluids to go into the formation that way when we come back behind you with logging tools, you're trying to minimize
21:22 as much as you can We can get a really good look at what the actual rock looks like, because you've damaged what you've drilled through, you've damaged with your fluids. It's not a true look at
21:32 what you're actually, what's actually there. And so you're, you want to be able to look through that in the formation. Well, and so it is, there's a primary and secondary function of getting,
21:44 of, of lowering your fluid loss end of building a wall cake, the, the, the primary is while you're drilling. you know, we're drilling through these clays and whatever clay it might be. And,
21:59 you know, clays when they get wet expand. And that's when they start to slough in on you or that's when they get brittle and start to break. So that's the primary thing that you have to do to begin
22:14 with, to just to create a stable well bore. And then, you know, the weight you need to keep, you need to have, you need to be balanced. And that is, so that membrane, that well bore, if we
22:32 can, if we can minimize hydration of clays, we can, we can keep a stable open well bore longer. The longer you can do that, the better you can do that, the longer you can, you can drill. So
22:48 when we hear people say, sit on bottom and circulate. You're literally
22:56 you've stopped drilling and you're continuing to circulate that mud to keep that cake good and to hold that, use that hydraulic force to hold that hole open. 'Cause if you would shut everything down,
23:04 if you would just shut a drilling rig down, mid hole, everything would cave in, you probably couldn't pull that pipe ever back out. Well, you gotta get the cuttings out of the hole first. So for
23:14 what you drill, you know, let's just say we're at 7, 000 foot And something happens, you know, we're waiting on a call from Houston or waiting on a call from the geologist. Tell us what to do.
23:28 You're gonna keep circulating just to get those cuttings that you just drilled out of the hole. Okay. So if you just stop, those cuttings will settle back down. Settle back on your stuff. Yes.
23:39 Yeah,
23:41 there's a lot of different reasons that you would circulate, you know, just on bottom Most of the time it's, you're just waiting. You're waiting for, you're waiting to hear. Hey, what are we
23:52 gonna do next? Gotcha. But, so you, you, you spud in. In an ideal world, you know what the weight is. You know, you know what, what the well bore is gonna tell you 'cause you have offsets.
24:10 But if you don't, you know, in your instance, I would roll in with a nine one or a nine pound mud weight to begin with And I would start, I would start building a filter cake right away. I would
24:24 start adding polymers or lignite or whatever. You know, if a lime system, you know, you can add whatever you want. You're building that wall cake, you're drilling, you're watching the shakers.
24:40 You know, if you have a pace on, you can see what's coming back. You're talking to the mudlogger, seen what he's seeing is he seen popping shell is one of the cuttings look like. Um, and you,
24:54 you maintain what the well wants you to maintain. It'll, it'll talk to you. Yeah. You know, and, and if you hit a, you hit a point and you start seeing, you know, 3000 units of connection gas,
25:08 well, that means that I need to wait up. Cause I can, I can push that back. Right. But if you see a giant, you know, a giant increase in your pits, you have volume increase or you, Hey,
25:22 we're losing mud or over balance. Let's, let's dilute. Let's cut this back a little bit. Yeah.
25:29 Yeah. And that's a fine line too, right? We're like, if you are starting to see a bunch of connection gas, like you don't want to suppress what you have down there, you want to understand,
25:38 especially in like a wildcat scenario, you want to understand the formation. You want to know what's coming. Yes. But you also want to have control of it. Yeah This is like a fine line you walk.
25:49 Yeah. And last thing we want to do is, you know, get out of control. Yeah, well, in gas means that you're doing something right. We're, hey, we're in a zone that has a hydrocarbonate. Yeah.
25:59 But, you know, But you let that go too far too long. Yeah, you don't you don't want to blow out. Yeah. You know, it's it's you've got to you got to hold back the formation. Yeah, as much as
26:12 possible. Well, and I'm going to pause for a second because I I know we have a lot of different kind of folks that'll listen to this And so I want to take a second to explain a little bit of well
26:21 control to people that maybe aren't following what we're talking about here.
26:27 All fluids have a weight, right? So a gallon of water is 83 pounds per gallon. OK. 834. 83, 3, 3, 6, 7 pounds per gallon.
26:42 Yeah And so then you can take that the weight of that water in hydrostatic pressure is completely independent of volume. Right, so when we look at hydrostatic pressure, we just look at the height
26:55 of that fluid column. Look at like a water tower, right? A hundred feet high, okay? It's called at a hundred feet high for round numbers. It's got fresh water in it at
27:10 834 pounds per gallon job. We know that there's a little conversion ratio, we multiply that by 0052, and you use that for any fluid that you have a weight of, just multiply by 0052, and it gives
27:22 you a PSI per foot, a pressure gradient, right?
27:27 For fresh water, it's 0435? Yes, sir. 0435, so if we have 100 foot water tower, and we have fresh water in it, we know that our gradient is 0435, at the bottom of that water tower, we have
27:42 435 PSI of pressure, right? Correct. So when we're drilling into a formation, or in. I know these hydraulics because that all the way across like whether you're drilling, completing or producing
27:56 a well, you need to understand the force balance at depth, right?
28:03 So if we know that pressure of our fluids from the surface, then we can use that as kind of a proxy to what our pressure is down hole. Gives you a really good idea. A really good idea of what's
28:16 down hole and we can evaluate the formation down there by if we're gaining mud into our pits while we're drilling. And that means that the formation pressure is higher than that gradient that we have,
28:31 than the hydrostatic pressure of our fluid column. And so the formation is pushing our fluid out of the hole. Correct. Right. So if that's happening, we're losing fluid. We now no longer know
28:43 what fluid's coming into our hole. Right? 'Cause we don't exactly know what's in that formation yet.
28:50 Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, so we can test on site, we can see, we can check chloride levels. Most of the time, almost 99 of the time it's going to be a sodium chloride. It's a field brine
29:03 coming back. Unless you're close to an offset injection well, or disposal well or something. Or unless you're next to a, you know, this happened to me several times where we've been drilling,
29:17 but, you know, company B next door is fracking a well. And you're getting there. You're getting your crack fluid. Oh, that's going to be so frustrating.
29:29 Yeah, it gets scary. Yeah. It can be. Yeah. You know, there was a time in, it was down in Webb County where we hadn't underground blowout because of it You know, there's just nothing we could
29:42 do. We ended up losing the well. Wow. But yeah. But back to what you were explaining. Yeah, so well control wise, we wanna make sure that we are being diligent in monitoring that fluid in the
29:57 hole and that fluid out of the hole so that one, they're balanced and we have the whole stability, but two, that we're not taking formation fluid and formation gas that's gonna blow our mud out in
30:09 a way that we can't control that well. And then that's when we have a blowout. That is what a blowout is, that we no longer have hydrostatic control, and then we're relying on our BOPs, our
30:21 blowout preventers, which is our secondary envelope of control in a system. And so,
30:28 you know, that's, I just wanted to take a second to like help everybody make sure they're coming along when we talk about blowout and control of a well and hydrostatic pressure. So they understand
30:40 how we're getting there But that fine line is on the flip side. like this well, if you just have way too much mud weight,
30:52 there's your poor pressure and a
30:55 frat gradient there. So at any depth in a strata column, right? At any depth, there's a frat gradient. There's a point at which your fluid weight is higher than what it takes to fracture that
31:14 rock So at 500 feet, that frat gradient is way higher because you don't have all the hydrostatic pressure. But you have a lower frat gradient down at 10, 000 feet.
31:26 And so we want to make sure that we're not hitting that frat gradient. That's kind of like our upper boundary, right? Because if we hit that, we're going to lose all this fluid. It's going to go
31:35 into the formation. It's going to break everything up. We're going to induce permeability, which is going to - we're going to lose control in that way, too, all this much, it starts pouring out.
31:46 And then if it's pouring out at 10, 000 feet, we might've had a little pressure up there at 7, 000 feet. And now 'cause all this fluid is pouring out, it allows that pressure at 7, 000 feet to
31:56 come in and just compounds and it runs away. And now we've got a whole situation on our hands. And so we're staying in this lane. We're trying to walk this rope where it's just right. Yeah And
32:12 that's where good offsets will tell you a lot 'cause they've already done the legwork for you. In that instance, with most
32:23 formations, there's some chalk formations that deeper that have a lower pressure than the formations at pole. But you're gonna run, you're gonna see that on an offset and you're like, well, we
32:40 need the intermediate string 'cause we'll, for the pressure that we need down whole, to get to production depth, we're gonna break, we're gonna break open the formation 5, 000 foot up. Yeah,
32:52 isn't that nice? So we have 130 years worth of data now to kind of go off of when we're building these things. Yeah, that's my job. You know, I look and I try to give my
33:08 mud engineers on location the best playbook I can And it's real nice when you have three, five, six, 10 offset recaps that you can look at
33:22 and see. Yeah, and that
33:26 data is so important. And I don't know that it's been set enough. And I try to say it everywhere I can is like log the whole thing well.
33:37 Keep your data on your mud weights, Keep your your daily reports in.
33:44 it doesn't add a ton of value maybe to you that day. But the value it adds to the industry is in measurement. It pays dividends down the road. It does. And it's so immensely selfish in my book for
34:01 you to say on this8 million well, I'm gonna save1, 500 to not collect this data. Yeah. You know what I mean? To everybody else in the industry, that's kind of like a big screw you, I feel like.
34:14 And it's also cheap insurance, 'cause then you aren't collecting those lessons learned going forward. Yeah. It makes no sense to me. Yeah. On an8 million well, spend your15, 000 to do that.
34:27 Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox on that one. But as I say, it is cool that we, where we're at right now in the unconventional world is that,
34:40 so like,
34:43 I took this position with dress command, okay? And they use an AI program called Invict to AI. And one of the things we talk about there is that if we have a section in the Eagleford, the Permian
34:59 Basin, the Bakken, right? We've already drilled four, five, eight, 10 wells in there and put laterals in there. So when we come into infill or drill an offset right next to it, we don't need
35:13 to treat that offset as if it's the first one we've drilled, right? No. Why don't we run all this data through an AI program and give us those bumpers? Yeah, give you, give you some goal posts.
35:26 Yeah, and say, hey, this is what we're expecting. And if we're in factory farming mode with unconventionals, especially like in the Permian, right? Where we're looking at 30 wells a section,
35:37 right? We don't need to be, Um. We don't have to spend all this time in this money pretending like it's the first well we've drilled in that section. Like let's use that data and let's run those
35:49 bumpers and let's stay in zone and
35:54 yeah we already know what our mud weight like you're saying we already know what our mud weight should be and the wolf can't see yes and you you should get better every well you drill yeah you should
36:06 get more efficient yeah
36:10 and I've seen it to where with with much larger companies they'll run they'll run pretty sophisticated down hole logging tools on the first and the last well of a four well pad mm-hmm so it's just we
36:26 got this mm-hmm so we can we can deduce what the what was in the middle there yeah and then also what's them know you know on the outer boundaries like what they're looking at you've been on the flip
36:38 side which you see in South Texas in particular. And South Texas is so cool because it's like a, it's like a geologic playground. Like all these little grobins and four-way closures and traps and
36:50 like it's, it's just, it's cool geologically, but it doesn't lend to, a lot of times it doesn't lend to like really big fields scale-wise. But it does lend to like all these fun little one-off
37:02 wells you can drill and make a mint off of. Yeah. And so you, you probably get to see a whole bunch of cool stuff like drilling a 12, 13, 000 foot Vicksburg well. Yeah. You know, is - You've
37:14 got me a lot of high pressure gas there. It's totally different than drilling an Austin Chalkwell. Yeah, or it, but also in the same sense, you know, I can drill a Greta, I can drill Greta Well
37:25 in Jackson County that acts completely different than a Greta Well in the Nueces County. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, and, you know, just like with everything So, for example, people
37:37 will be more familiar with the Eagleford Shell.
37:43 Around the border, you get over there to Webb County, Maverick County. The Eagleford comes in at like 3, 200 foot. But then you get up around college station and the Eagle bind, the Eagleford up
37:58 there, comes in at 13, 000 foot. So just, I mean, just the pressure you're gonna see there alone is it just makes the form. It makes the Eagleford different as you had from West East. Yeah,
38:13 that's true. Like the thermal maturity changes, some of the facies changes. And I've always thought that's funny that the Eagle bind, I've said that to a couple of people. They're like, what's
38:22 the Eagle bind? I'm like, oh yeah, it's the Eagleford when you get over the Matador arch, all of a sudden we call it the Eagle bind. Yes. Like it's a same thing. And then - Eventually it
38:32 becomes the wood bind, isn't it? Yes. You know, and so that's where they're like, the same, but it's different. I think they were just trying to, uh, they're just trying to kind of bastardize
38:41 the eagle bind and the wood bind and the eagle for it. Yeah. I wasn't the one, uh, I wasn't the one naming it. I donated three Goodman formulas. You can't take credit for that one, huh? I wish
38:54 you would have hand. I'd be making royalties off that son of a gun.
38:59 I wished I would have to. Well, we'll find a new one and we'll name it
39:06 We'll name it the Reed Mosley. Nobody don't know who that guy is. I like it. No, but getting back to it, you know,
39:14 the formation is a change. You know, I've done a lot of grit, a lot of freo sand stuff, a lot of yayoa stuff in South Texas.
39:25 And it is. It's interesting. You know, you'll have a geologist put an X on a map You know, they see, they see a little up dip there that.
39:38 that water has pushed all this oil up and it's like, hey, let's go try to get this 800, 000 barrels. Hopefully we can get it.
39:50 And there's different approaches you take to different wells, mostly predicated on depth and pressure Yeah. So we've talked a good bit about the hole itself, but I want to hear about. So you
39:55 mentioned like the hydraulics holding the hole open, but also tools. We've got to
40:16 get this
40:18 mud through our tools and we're no longer. Most rigs aren't rotary rigs anymore. We're turning anything at surface. Like, I mean, we can rotate our string when we're sliding and stuff, but
40:29 everything's being cut with a mud motor and a bit. It's being power generated down home. And that factors
40:41 in largely to how y'all condition, design, add stuff into your mind. You know, we're less concerned with the mud
40:50 properties in terms of
40:55 the motors that are in the hole. I mean, obviously, if we have a small TFA on the bit, if we have a rotary stir-able down hole, we don't want to be sending 60 pounds per barrel worth of course
41:06 LCM through it. These are million dollar tools. 'Cause it'll wash 'em out, destroy things. No, absolutely, and you're washing out rubbers all
41:16 the time, anyhow. But with, I think that the tool companies have, they've actually kind of blended towards, they've made their tools with the mud in mind more than we have towards a mud motor.
41:33 Interesting Yeah, no. once again, you know, we aren't going to be sending a pallet full of roofing Nels down hole. Right. Because, you know, that would just wreck everything. Plus it, you
41:45 know, it's going to clog up the bit. But
41:49 yeah, there's, there is a lot of, there's a lot of room, though, that if a directional driller comes to me or the directional company comes to me and they'll give me, go, I'll ask for those
42:05 goalposts. I'll be like, well, where do you need me to stay in between? And yeah, they, they usually give me
42:13 a palimper barrel number that they want. Gotcha. And, and yeah, you know, yeah, you work alongside them to help them out
42:24 because all, we all have the same goal in mind. Yeah. And you, you, um, you talk about like roofing nails. So we have shakers, so we have screens and stuff to pull the drill cuttings out. So
42:36 when our mud is going back in whole, it's pretty uniform.
42:42 It should go back in pretty uniform. It should be, I mean, say you're taking gas, right? Well, in the way the rig is set up, so they're the pits. And usually the suction is the furthest away.
43:02 Well, not usually all the time A suction pit that goes down hole, that goes through the pumps, up in the top driving down hole, is as far away from the shakers and where the return feed is as
43:16 possible. Okay. And then from there, it'll go to the shakers and just sand trap. That sand trap will then bleed into like a settling pit, which will then bleed into the active system. So we're
43:31 letting things settle out more than filtering them out. Correct.
43:40 And you're going to see the solid settle out and then you're going to see any gas or any sort of air by the time it gets to the suction pit will most of the time be settled up. But as far as chemical
43:54 properties go, yes, it's uniform. Unless you're waiting up as you go, like you're going to be sending in, let's just 10 pound mud, you need to wait up to attend to, you know, you'll, you'll
44:09 see it go in at 10 at 10 to, but it will take, you know, a circulation circulation in half to get that 10 to back out. Right. Right. So and you continue to wait it up. But I mean, like, if
44:20 you were to take a sample of it and like pour it, it would pour like chocolate milk. It's like, uh, it's a flu. It's not like,
44:29 it's not like mud that my six-year-old throws at me. No. Right. It's like, it's a very, It's, it's a liquid, it's gonna, it's gonna flow through the screen. It's smooth and it's uniform and
44:39 you could probably roll it between your fingers and it not feel like super gritty necessarily. Correct. Most likely. Yeah. And there will be, there will be temperature things that happen down
44:49 whole to, to the additives and the chemicals that we put in the mud that will degrade them by the time they get back. But it's, it's never, it's very rarely drastic. Mm hmm You'll see it. It'll
45:04 be a slow burn coming on you.
45:09 Not all the time, but typically. There have been times where we've hit CO2 and everything going in is great, but then it comes back out looking like chocolate milk. That's why you treat it in the
45:26 pits. You treat it in that column of pits by the time it gets back to the the suction pit. Oh, and that CO2 has come out and it's kind of - Well, you've treated it out, or you're working on it.
45:38 Gotcha.
45:41 But, you know, there's a host, there's various, there's various downhole contamination issues that you can have. Yeah. You just, you know, you kind of, and you don't always see it in the mud,
45:52 you know, sometimes you hit anhydrite, and the bit just stops. I mean, you know, your ROP will be cut by 90 And it's like, okay, well, we know what we have. So we can, you know, we can
46:07 treat, we can treat chemically in the pits to help drill through that anhydrite back. Gotcha, gotcha. An anhydrite is a salt. Correct. It's kind of salt,
46:21 like gypsum. A little bit, I would have to look up, I'd have to look up and see what it is. It's not, I don't think it's calcium, it's not. Yeah.
46:33 Yeah, and hydrides it kind of, from what I understand, it's a kind of salt with
46:38 like super fine in texture. And normally, I think it's normally a good thing when you're looking for hydrocarbons to have some anhydride around. Well, and you see it often. Yeah. As like a seal,
46:51 you know, like kind of like the trap for the top of a formation. There's a layer of it in the - Calcium sulfate, C-A-S-O-4 C-I-S-S-O-4. Yeah, so it's calcium itself. Yeah. Treat it with soda
47:04 ash, it's a pH thing. Gotcha. Yeah. Gotcha.
47:10 There's a layer of it on top of the chalk that you have to break through. In some places, it's thicker than others. Yeah, yeah, you gotta beat through that to get into the, or I mean, to get to
47:20 the Eagleford as well, but that's probably about the time you're starting your kickoff too. You see a lot more anhydrite
47:28 over in the Hanesville area, East Texas. Yeah.
47:32 Yeah, East Texas, Northeast Texas. Those boys up there are dealing with a lot of it. And I know there's a lot in the Bakken. There's like the, there's the Apache salt and then there's the
47:44 Charles salt and they're like big and thick and it's, actually it's interesting 'cause that's one of the reasons why you talked about setting intermediate casing. When you're looking at the
47:54 lithology of North Dakota, which I've been studying a lot lately for various reasons, but there's a, there's a apachee or opechee or apachee. Depends on who you're talking to. Me and my geologist
48:07 go back and forth all the time on it. But anyways, the apachee salt, and then another two or 3, 000 feet deeper, you have the Charles salt. And what they wanna do is they wanna punch through
48:19 both of those and set their intermediate. And there's an over pressure zone between the two. And so if you can get through both of those salts, set your seven inch casing. And that's why to this
48:30 day, the majority of wells in North Dakota are seven by four and a half completion design. So we get all the way through that second salt. We set that four and a half and then they go ahead and
48:39 kick out and start drilling the three forks or the, the bokeh or whatever below that and run their four and a half through that. But they want to get through that salt first. Yeah. The, the bokeh
48:49 and don't give me a line on the bokeh and I don't, I've never, it's too cold in North Dakota, not that I wouldn't go up there, but yeah, I've, I've never done anything in a bokeh. Yeah. Yeah.
49:02 No, it's been a little, uh, been a pet project of mine for almost a year now, uh, trying to do some stuff up there. So, uh, you close dude, it's such a,
49:17 yes, no, I don't know. I've got all the data done I've got all the work done and I've been trying to get, I've been trying to get a farm Okay. On some acreage up there. 'Cause everything that's
49:33 good for what we want to do, it's also good for blocking. So all of it's held by production by all these different guys, but nobody is looking at the formation we're looking at. And
49:46 it's like I want to get a farm out on this acreage, but nobody is willing to take any risk. I'm just having a hard time getting buy-in from the people up there. Yeah, I've talked to everybody at
49:55 all these different companies. You know, I've talked to Exxon, I've talked to Conoco, and I've talked to Devin, and I've talked to all these guys, and they're like, I'm like, look, I will
50:03 take 100 of the risk. I will put up all the money.
50:10 You don't have to put up any money. And if we hit, you get 12 and 12 back in on it. You know, like, if it doesn't work, you don't lose anything. And they won't even, no conversation about it
50:21 hardly. You're just needing, you're just needing their infrastructure and their logistics. I'm needing their acreage I can build moan pads. I can build moan. you know, tank batteries and
50:32 everything like that. That's no problem at all. Yeah, but that's frustrating. And just need their acreage. And it's not acreage that they're, it's acreage they're doing something within the
50:39 Bakken,
50:41 but they're not doing anything in this formation. And as far as we know, there's no, nobody's talked about any intent, really, to do anything in this, it gets frustrating. So
50:53 it is what it is, you know?
50:56 And I probably shouldn't have said that. Maybe we'll cut it out. Maybe we won't, I don't know Maybe it will hit somebody that's like, oh, we'll farm out some acreage to you guys.
51:07 But that's part of the business, right? Is finding a way to beat through and get over and get around those hurdles. Yeah. And yeah. So where am I with it? Every month, I have like a high and a
51:22 low during the month. I'm like, we all just made this happen and then somebody'll ghost me in the next month, you know? I'm real frustrated again. So anyway, that's, that's a there. Yeah,
51:34 well. It's doing. Yeah, you never know, I mean. Oil's not going anywhere. Oil's not going anywhere. It's gonna stay there and there might be a time where we hit 90, 100, 150 oil and
51:48 it gives them an excuse. Yeah. I had one group agree to letting me drill two wells. And that was it. I was like, you have 150, 000 acres You're going to let me drill two wells and do the
52:01 discovery on it. And then you're going to go print money on the other 149, 000 acres? Like, no, no, thank you.
52:11 Unless you'd have to have contractually some sort of. Drill to earn agreement that says, I'm in it for some percentage on everything after this or you let me drill it and y'all get your percentage
52:24 or whatever.
52:27 It's really interesting that nobody's, very few people are interested in exploration in the US. right now. They're wanting to buy acreage in the Permian, they're wanting to buy acreage in the
52:39 Eagleford, they're wanting to buy acreage in the Hanesfield. But nobody wants to go drill anything cool and new, from like a medium to large size operator standpoint. Yeah, well, and in
52:53 the world of private equity and also in the world of 20, 000 foot laterals, it's kind of the King's sport. It's the horse racing of sports 'cause it takes a lot of money to do that.
53:12 And I don't know
53:16 the deep economics of that.
53:21 What's the margin five, six, 10 that they're making on that? Yeah, and IRR on Good Wells right now is
53:30 40 to 50 in the Delaware Basin, maybe.
53:35 And these guys are looking at, I don't know, they're happy with the three X return, nine to 12 month capital return, or some of the metrics out there. And so,
53:49 but like the wildcatting side, like what you're drilling in South Texas, you might hit one out of five, but that one's gonna be a 10 or 12 or 15 X well. Yeah. And it doesn't, you know, just the
54:03 AFE on one of these wells is nothing. Right. Well, I mean, nothing's nothing,
54:09 but it's, you can make 15 X on one well, and it overcomes, you know, if you do have three poor wells. Yeah, to drill a five, 5, 300
54:22 foot Yewa Hockley.
54:25 you know, Jackson Group Well, and South Texas is 800, 850, 000. So if we make 25, 000 barrels, we've got it paid for. Oh yeah. And Drillin, one of those wells should make 150, 200, 000
54:39 barrels. You know, and so, you know, if you're in a good spot, 200, 000 barrels is not unheard of, we'll shoot. You've almost 10 extra money on that one. Like, that's a pretty good return.
54:49 I'd take it. Yeah. Yeah, me too. I would take that all day long I'm still working on it. I've yet to find anything that gives me 10X. Yeah. Yeah.
55:01 Maybe eight and a half. Did you take eight and a half? Yeah, you know, I'd take anything. We'll talk about the podcast. There we go. Ah, just kidding. I got that one sold.
55:13 Yeah, fun stuff. All right, so, I'll go ahead. Well, I was just, you know, back to conventional wells, back to mud. Yeah, I was really out of my lane right there. I have no clue about the
55:24 economics from the production side, from an operator side. I know like, I'm just sitting here trying to act like I know and I act cool. Dude, this is why, this is why you're on, 'cause I know
55:33 like this much, yeah, like this much about like
55:40 a lot of different sides of the industry and I'm trying to deepen my knowledge bench on everyone And so having somebody in your pocket that you can call, like Blake, be like, hey, we got this
55:53 project coming up, sort me out here. So what I would do is I would, first thing is, I get offsets, I
56:08 research well, you tell me where you wanna go, from there, if it is any sort
56:18 of, if there is any sort of, of, of. uncertainty to it. You know, there's a lot of lab work we can do. If you if you can pull water samples from anything close, you know, I can I can tell you
56:31 what you're going to see down there or get close to it. Yeah. Um, from there, you know, we, you know, I put together a program for you And, uh,
56:45 we, we, uh, we send our guys out and we try to, we try to drill you well. So trends, trends in the industry. Um, how do you feel and turn this into a third position? How do you feel when I
57:03 use the word sexy brines? Sexy brides brines. Oh, sexy brines. Yeah. I've drilled with a lot of brine. Okay. Well, how, how do they get sexy? Well, I don't know. You know, exotic. Exotic
57:18 brines. Yeah. So here's the thing with Brian is depends on how exotic you want to get is there's a price tag sometimes too exotic. The heavier you get, the more the brine costs.
57:37 You have a KCL, which what does it go up to like 97? You can get a maximum weight of 97 with the KCL Your sodium chloride, that's 10 pound brine.
57:51 Calcium chloride goes up to 116 and you can reasonably buy an 116 calcium chloride for,
58:01 you can go to tetra, you can get it for around 36 to 40 dollars a barrel. Anything above 116, you have to get into the bromide world. Anytime you get into the bromide world, getting back to 10x
58:15 and stuff, it 10 X is your cost. Gotcha. Because well first. First, the safety issues of just bromide in general,
58:27 but then the heavier
58:31 the weight of the brine gets, the more expensive it gets. One of the last jobs I did offshore, we drilled the well and they kept us on as mud engineers for the completion side. And we were using
58:41 an 18 pound zinc bromide. Wow. And they were, I think it was430
58:49 a barrel. Wow. Is what it was costing. So if you lost that to anything, if you lost it to formation, if you accidentally spilt some, yeah, you know, while taking a sample to run a check. Yeah,
59:03 you know, it was 400. There's 50 bucks. Yeah. So it, you know, sexy brines. Yeah, sounds fun. Yeah, But there's a cost to sexy brides.
59:15 It seemed to me like I read an article and I could be recollecting this incorrectly, but that a lot of guys in the Permene in particular were going to drilling with Brian.
59:28 Maybe 'cause they can recycle and reuse it? Is that a thing? Yeah. And use it over and over? You know, and there's drill and fluids that you can use that are Brian-based. Okay. And there's
59:40 getting back to the Greta formation, there's an operator or two operators that I've drilled
59:48 two, three dozen wells with down there. And
59:54 this ties back into well-bore stability is, you know, I've talked to them into instead of a fresh water, using their own production water, using the sodium chloride that's coming out of the, out
1:00:06 of their own well-bore. Yeah. You know, one, because, you know, We know that the formation is used to that. It's not gonna swell a clay or have some kind of chemical reaction. As bad, yeah.
1:00:20 And we've seen, I've seen a lot of success in that. We've also done some short, you know, Greta Freo laterals with the Drillin fluid that it's a brine that we put, you know, 50 to 60 pounds per
1:00:40 barrel of calcium carbonate in And instead of running a casing and perforating, they're running a screen and it's an open hole completion. You know, there's a lot of movement for brines. It's all
1:00:54 weight dependent and weight equals cost in brines. Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah. And the alternative is a fresh water base, maybe a diesel base or a polymer Synthetic
1:01:12 Yeah, synthetics. So there's fresh water, there's salt water, there's brine, there's diesel, and there's a synthetic. And anything diesel synthetics, it's an invert mud. Okay. Extremely
1:01:26 stable. What do you mean with the word invert? Stable? It's an invert emulsion. Yeah, it's, have you ever seen mayonnaise made? You know, they take an egg and they take the oil. And then they
1:01:38 mix it up, mix it up, and it makes, that's an emulsion. Okay. That is the blending of those two things. Kind of like aerates and fluffs and it becomes. Correct, and an emulsion in a
1:01:55 diesel-based mud is not a bad thing. We use emulsifiers all the time. It's a binding agent that helps keep our fluid together. It combats against heat, combats, combats against a lot of stuff So
1:02:09 you're adding things to the diesel? So it's not, yeah. We don't just drill with diesel. I guess that's something to like wrap my head around too is like, we use the term diesel based mud, which
1:02:23 means the base fluid we start with is diesel. But in my head, it's like 997 diesel. It's typically 80 diesel, 20 calcium chloride. Okay. Yeah. Okay, so we're adding a little bit of brine in
1:02:37 there. Yeah, brine and some brine. And into that Yeah, and those are for, 'cause you need a chloride, you need a chloride in your system. Okay. So kind of the general rule,
1:02:50 the general rule is, you want your fluid to have as much, to have a chloride content equal to or greater than the formation you're drilling. Okay. And that helps with the stability and that goes
1:03:05 back to kind of, you know, using the, using the produced brine.
1:03:13 from the same formations drill.
1:03:17 Okay, interesting. And then there's a whole host
1:03:22 of different chemicals, in
1:03:26 different additives, different products that we'll use in a drilling fluid. Like a diesel oil-based mud is not just diesel. We're adding lime to combat gas, to combat CO2, as the lime will eat up
1:03:39 to
1:03:41 CO2 Big chemically reacts with the CO2, and kind of like takes it out of the system. Yeah, you know, we're adding viscosifiers. Okay. To
1:03:48 one, to
1:03:51 give us a carrying capacity, to hold the cuttings, and then give us a yield point, to then move the cuttings up the hole and out of the hole. We're using, you know, almost fires, electrical,
1:04:06 EES, E-E-S, you know, E-E-S. we're using emulsifiers, um, line, obviously there's, there's the, there's the weight aspect of it. And you have to use those viscosifiers in order to be able to,
1:04:26 to hold, you know, to hold your weight, your weight. Just to spend all of that crazy agent as well. Um, what is Baywright? Barium's off it. It's a waiting agent. It's a waiting agent It's
1:04:40 what weights up our fluid. Am I correct in thinking that so a lot of a number of people in my family are, which is why I should be smarter about this stuff, but, um, on the drilling side,
1:04:53 particularly on my dad's side of the family. And if I recall right when I was like about eight or 10, we were building a new tank at the ranch. And one of my uncles showed up, not uncle, I call
1:05:03 him uncle, but he's cousin, uh, one of my uncle cousins showed over like a palette of Baywright to put in the bottom of that to like seal it. To seal it? Yeah. Okay. Does that make sense? Or
1:05:14 am I remembering that incorrectly? I have sold a lot of bentonite. Bentonite, maybe that's it. Yes, so bentonite's a clay. And it's what we use, it's a viscosifier in the drilling fluid. And I
1:05:30 have sold truckloads of pallets of bentonite to ranchers and farmers to put in the bottom of their tanks Does it help seal it off in water? Well, what it does is you have, just like with everything,
1:05:45 you have billions little micro fractures
1:05:49 in the bottom of that tank. And you'll work in that bentonite, that gel into the tank bottom. And when the water does hit it, it expands. Yep. And it
1:06:05 makes a good barrier to hold in that water. I mean, I was 10 years old. You can't expect me to remember that for the next 20 years of my life. No, but it's very effective. And I've even seen
1:06:20 farmers ask landowners, ask
1:06:24 for the spud mud to put in their tanks. 'Cause it has a lot of bentonite in it. It has a lot of bentonite. To make your whole - And then all the natural clays that you've just drilled and picked up.
1:06:36 Interesting. Yeah. Huh Yeah, we've, you know, I've had 'em pull up with pull. I've had 'em pull in with tractors,
1:06:49 with tanks on the back. And just try to take some, just ready to, yeah. That's funny. You know,
1:06:54 oil and gas is like the original, you're talking about Bakersfield, California, and when I lived in Austin for a little while, and they had the slogan, Reduce, Recycle, Reuse. And the longer
1:07:10 I'm in oil and gas more, I'm like, Man, we are the original reduced recycle reuse. Like the pipe fence around my house came out of one of our wells, you know? The sucker rods. All the sucker
1:07:20 rods that our gates are built out of came out of the house, the spud mud, you know? Like we are the original, we're so much more green than people realize. Oh, no, absolutely. I remember being
1:07:33 a kid, my grandparents lived up in Oklahoma and they had a sucker rod fence all the way around. Yeah. They had a couple acres, but it was full of, you know, sucker rods on metal pipe. Yep, yep,
1:07:47 production tubing for pipe fences. And actually, so I'm gonna like way derail this conversation for a second. When we built our house in 2020, we decided that we wanted a peer in beam house. Okay.
1:08:02 And for a number of reasons I had a bunch of four and a half casing.
1:08:09 five foot long chunks of that four and a half casing. And I'd weld a three eights plate on top. And dad and I concreted all those in as our pilings for our house. So our house sits on a ton of four
1:08:21 and a half inch casing as our pilings. And then, you know, every so many years with a pure and beam house, you wanna have somebody come out and like shoot grade to make sure that it's not settling
1:08:31 in anyway. And that dude crawled under there. And he was like, dude, what is that? I was like, man, that's casing from, you know, we had left over from a well. And he was like, I've never
1:08:41 seen that, but that is one of the greatest ideas. He's like, your house has not moved an inch. Well, it works. And he's like, you'll never get termites 'cause they don't have wood to crawl up.
1:08:49 Yeah. You know, he's like, come on. I've, I have one in my backyard. I've seen smokers, you know, made out of 20 inch casing. Yeah. I've cooked hundreds of steaks on smokers made out of
1:09:02 casing. Yeah. Yeah, that stuff though, you don't want to go into the well you want to get the fresh, like the drops. Yeah, it's what they're cutting off, you know. Yeah, used Casey would be
1:09:16 a real problem. Yeah, you know, if
1:09:21 people are fanatical bought their briskets, they'll cook it in the way they can get. It's true, it's true. That might add
1:09:31 a little extra zing. It might add some flavor. Oh, well, what have we not covered? Let's see Hmm, we've covered hydraulics. We've covered filter cake. We've covered underbalanced and
1:09:43 overbalanced. Do
1:09:46 you have much, have you done much experience on the, have you done much experience? Do you have much experience on the completion side, like drill outs inside a case hole? Yeah, a little bit So
1:10:02 I've AFRON called system a recently about heard
1:10:04 .
1:10:07 I think is the name. But like the idea, what I understood from the very short conversation we had about it was that some of these formations, particularly in the Permian, are so depleted at this
1:10:20 point, that they can't, like they're pumping 130 pound per barrel, you know, cotton seed to try to get returns while they're drilling out post frack. Okay. And so there's, I wanna say it's
1:10:34 called Afron, like A-P-H-R-O-N.
1:10:38 But it's like this super light mud, like five pounds per gallon, so that you can get enough pressure to get around when you're drilling out your plugs.
1:10:54 I thought that was kind of a cool idea, like, you know, kind of like we have any freeze where we like way change the freezing point, that we could like wave light in the fluid. Like 'cause
1:11:03 normally we start with fresh water is like in production and - Is it like a foam? Maybe it's a foam. Yeah, so you're up in the Northeast, up in the Utica, in the Marcellus, we drill in certain
1:11:16 areas out west as well. We drill the surface and even the intermediates on air. And you're drilling it on air. You're basically drilling with a foamed-up system. Okay.
1:11:29 There's multiple benefits to that There's multiple reasons to do that. It's area specific, but that seems like in this case, they were basically drilling on what we
1:11:44 in the mud world would call an air system. Okay. To be, because they were so, because the upper formations for, you know, a water, a fresh water would be overbalanced. Okay.
1:12:02 then they would obviously set a casing after that, correct, before going on to their production or - Well, so this one - Oh no, this is in production. We've already got everything cased and
1:12:11 fracked and we're drilling out fracked plugs, but the formation is so low pressure, like the Joe Mills or, yeah, some of the spray berries. Like they've already got 17 wells in that section in
1:12:26 that formation, right, and it's depleted So there's just little to no bottom hole pressure. So even putting fresh water on it, you don't get any returns. You just lose your fluid. So they're
1:12:38 going to these like super light, you know, systems that try to get returns to get those fracked plugs out, which is because they still make oil. Even though it's had depleted, they're still
1:12:48 pulling a ton of oil out of there. It's coming out. No, it's the Afrom system is will be a fancy name for a foamed air system. Okay. Yeah How do you, how do you make that? How do you make a
1:13:02 foam, you foam it in your pits? Water soap, it's a specialty soap. And you like put it in a mixer, like a tub? No, the foaming unit is a separate unit that sets off to the side. Okay. And it
1:13:18 will make the foam and it will come back, you'll send it down a hole.
1:13:24 It will carry out cuttings. It will carry, you know, and you can treat it You can, you know, viscosify it a little bit and it will carry out cuttings and then when it comes back over, you'll hit
1:13:37 it with a defomer. Okay. And then it will turn into water. Okay. And that water will go back to the fomer and then - Be foamed up again. Correct. And, but it'll come over the shakers like
1:13:50 normal and you will remove your cuttings. Yeah, like hydraulically, that's, I bet that's an interesting one to work with 'cause like fluids are non-compressible. Yes. but if we have foam and
1:14:01 we've got air in there, now there's some compressibility factor. Yeah, so I mean, it's the majority of it is air. Yeah. And where we were in the Northeast, the main concern there is all the
1:14:15 coal mines, you know? They know where they are most of the time, but there will be times. You don't want to hit one of those caverns and just. Well, exactly, 'cause, you know, there were
1:14:28 wild cat coal mines back in the day that were never logged or never, hey, this is the X and Y of, you know? Yeah. Oh, Joe Earl didn't go
1:14:43 in, tell the local community. Yeah, he was just mining for him and his cousins to have some heat in the winter. Trying to stay warm. That's it. Oh, yeah. None, and, you know, you drill off
1:14:54 into one of those and you lose everything. Yeah. That's interesting, though. That's, I have, you know, I've done a little bit of work in West Texas, not a ton. I've mostly, I've mostly stuck
1:15:09 to California, South Texas, East Texas, Louisiana, and the
1:15:19 Northeast, but.
1:15:22 Well, I had an old timer in Corpus. I went on a high drive at the American bank bill. No, it wasn't the American bank What's the black one? The glass with like the black glass?
1:15:38 That is the, it's a bank. Is it the Wells Fargo building? It's the Wells Fargo building. Anyways, I had an old timer in there. One of those like little companies that drills four or five wells a
1:15:50 year, you know, conventional stuff.
1:15:55 Tell me, he's like, well,
1:15:59 If you can drill in South Texas, you can drill anywhere. We've got the most technically challenging wells in the world. If you can drill in South Texas, you can drill anywhere. I'm going to say,
1:16:11 what are you drilling for? If you're going into a 4, 000 foot yayoa, yeah, we
1:16:18 can do that, anybody can do that. The Vicksburgs are challenging. Okay. It's all pressure related. Gotcha You know, you're looking at, you know, three strings of pipe and then a liner, and
1:16:32 you're looking at an 18-pound mud at the end, and pressure makes everything, pressure makes everything more difficult, and it makes it more expensive If you can, I would agree with him in the
1:16:48 sense of if you can drill a 400-degree Vicksburg
1:16:59 down on the King Ranch. You can,
1:17:03 you can do most anything. Gotcha. Yeah. All right. It's, yeah. Once again though, that Vicksburg's different, 80 miles away. Right, 'cause I have some stuff that has Vicksburg shows at like,
1:17:19 I don't know, 3, 000, 3, 700 feet. Yeah. You know, so, as one thing about like South Texas, you can name a formation, like the Wilcox, where my house is, is at 8, 000 feet. The Wilcox,
1:17:33 where my little shallow producers up in La Verne are, the Wilcox is the water table at 400 feet. Oh, really? Yeah. But I learned that, I was like, wait a second pause. Like, this is not the
1:17:43 same formation, but then you start to understand the Texas coast. Yeah. And the closer you get to the coast,
1:17:54 the more sediment,
1:17:59 And the more buildup there was, the more, you know, there's a gumbo section that is just a nightmare sometimes. Is that right? Yeah, and I've been, I've been in, I've been down around Beaumont
1:18:11 drilling a conventional well and we hit tar, you know? Mm-hmm. To, you know, trying to drill through around, around Bay City, you know, trying to drill into a salt dome Yeah. They're all
1:18:29 unique, they're all different. Yeah. And there's different approaches you take to each one of them. Yeah, that's interesting too, 'cause you're not just gonna cut through everything. You know,
1:18:37 you're gonna ball up a tricone or even a PDC's just gonna like slick over at some point. And so you've gotta have some sort of chemical side to your mud systems that's gonna help you, you know,
1:18:49 harden that, or soften that, or wash it away, or whatever it may be. Yeah, they're all unique. And there's different challenges. And even on the unconventional stuff,
1:18:60 we've been on a four-well pad, and we drill the first well. 14, 000 foot lateral goes great. No problems. The second well is like hell's half acre, man. It's like, where did this come from?
1:19:14 We did not see that. Yeah. And the well bore is a 30 foot apart It's just,
1:19:21 I'll tell you from a production side where you will call that well a snake bit well. Yeah. By the time it gets to us running, you know, a packer, a gas lift, putting it on production, like
1:19:33 there's been, you, there's always, not always. If there's a well that had problems, if there's problems, it's with the same well, the whole way through on that pad. And so like they had
1:19:45 problems drilling it. They had problems completing it. Now we know that a packer's gonna get stuck or somebody's gonna miss count something or it's not gonna come online, right? It's like, it's
1:19:54 weird how that particular well has like some bad juju on it. So we call it snake-biz. Now,
1:20:03 what's the common denominator? Past the drilling side, what would be the common denominator there?
1:20:11 Would it be that, would it be that they had to, they had to kick off, they had to, they had to sidetrack. And then it just makes it harder getting it or what's the common denominator typically?
1:20:27 I don't know what like really, truly causes that well to be harder or more of a problem a lot of times. It's just like,
1:20:36 it's things that,
1:20:39 it's not always things that make sense, okay? So, wire line could pull out a rope socket in that well.
1:20:48 in a section that's not even deviated. And it's like, why? Why did that happen? I'm not really sure. But you're guaranteeing tea that's gonna happen on that well on that pad. A plug's gonna
1:20:60 preset, you know, like you just, if you're gonna have issues, it's gonna be with that one. It's gonna be with that well. A choke's gonna wash out, whatever it may be. And it's like a choke
1:21:11 washing out has nothing to do with how you might've drilled it, right? It's a little bit, it's a little bit superstitious, but it seems to hold pretty true. You go to ask a lot of production or
1:21:27 tool hands or flow back hands and they're like, yeah, this well. I mean, this pad, it was that well. Well, this is one thing I do know that I
1:21:39 spent 13 years working 14 on, 14 off as a Mutt-and-Shiner on a rig, 777 whatever I can tell you that I have done 90 of our cement jobs between between 12 am. to 5 am. And the ones that we that
1:21:57 weren't in that
1:21:59 time slot, it was on during the super we were we were cementing during the Super Bowl. We were cementing. Yeah. You know, there's always there's always an inconvenient time. Always cement at
1:22:13 night. Yeah. It's just a rule of thumb. You know, you get good at it. Yeah. Maybe the snakebit wells were cemented during the day. You know, I'm gonna have to go do some data. That's what
1:22:26 lifted on its head. It was just too easy. Missed our pull and drilling reports and correlating. Time of day. Time of cement job. Yeah. I mean, that's not Joe. My mom was a nurse. She's an RN
1:22:40 for 35 years. She's retired now, but like 12 those years.
1:22:50 She was in the ER, and she swears up and down about a full moon. Is that right? She says, It is a thing. People just get weird. She's loony, man. The weirdest stuff she would come home and
1:23:03 tell us about, they all come out, you know? And maybe, maybe, you know, maybe sea mentors are just full moon type people. Maybe they are, like werewolves, we just don't know We have no clue.
1:23:18 I mean, they're a different breed too. I don't know, every
1:23:23 like little niche in the oil field has
1:23:28 some, some stereotype about like, hell, those guys on the moon engineer you never see. Well, you know - He's just kind of - Yeah, offshore the joke was is, you know, they, you sleep till you
1:23:43 get hungry and you could, till you get tired, right? But, Um. No, I mean, you know, we're, we're, we're, we're the guy sitting next to the, the company man in the directional driller when,
1:23:56 when we're, when we're, uh, when we're having problems. So if you don't see us, it's probably a good thing. Yeah. That's right. Things are going well. That's right. Yeah.
1:24:11 I was talking with JT this morning about a project and, uh, um, that address. He's like, man, I have to keep calling these guys and getting an update. And I'm like, JT, why are you mad about
1:24:18 that? He's like, well, I know that means there's no problems, but also like, you know, I want to be in the mix. I wish to send me a text or something. Yeah. Every 12 hours, no problems all
1:24:30 as well. Maybe, maybe he should, uh, maybe he should take the initiative and get, and get like a WhatsApp like group going or something. Yeah. Yeah. Or at least, uh, a text thread. He's
1:24:41 like, man, I don't hear anything from him. I know that means that, you know, nothing's wrong, but I'm so used to, you know, 20 years of like being up at 2 am. on whatever phone call, trying
1:24:50 to figure some out. He's like, it just, it's hard for me to, hard for me to sit back and just be like, all right, it's good, I can relax, you know, pour another cup of coffee. I have a
1:25:03 few operators that, you know, there's a mandatory 6 am, 6 am. conference call, which means I'm talking to my mother engineer or whenever I was on a rig, I was talking to my coordinator or the
1:25:13 engineer at 5 am, you know, just getting ready. And there's times where, there's times where it's, hey,
1:25:21 you know, 430 is my normal in the morning. Yeah. But. Yeah, my wife has astounded that I can, like somebody calls me at 2 am, I will roll over, sit up, grab my phone. You're like, you know,
1:25:37 good morning, this is Reed.
1:25:39 How are you so awake? I'm like, I'm not awake. It's just my voice that sounds awake. I've learned how to, I've learned how to say it. I've learned how to wake up and sound like I've been awake
1:25:50 for five hours. Which actually has a, so it sounds like you've got a kid. Yeah, yeah, I got an eight year old. So it served me very well. Well, we've got a six and a five right now. Yeah,
1:26:00 six year old and the other one just turned five. But it served me very well, having infants that I could just like be awake and then fall back asleep Yes. You know, go do my thing, check what I
1:26:12 need to check, change a diaper, whatever, maybe, and then be able to go back to sleep. My wife couldn't do that. Yeah, I can do that too. Now, I have the problem that if my phone rings, or
1:26:24 even if I have it on silent and I hear it vibrating, I will wake up at 2 am. and answer like that. But if the dog's barking or the kid's crying, It's, and she gets so frustrated. I'm like, do
1:26:40 you not hear them? I'm like, uh, what do I say? Maybe I did. Maybe I was just hoping I saw you move first. That's right. Yeah. And then, you know, I remember, I remember, you know, on the
1:26:54 rigs, you know, you're sitting there sleeping and then you hear the, you hear the motors wind up and it would wake me up. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, Oh, something's wrong. Let me go look at this
1:27:03 base on can't do that with these electric rigs. No, no, that'd be harder. But yeah, well, and, and sometimes I'll, I'll wake up to a message or a text or an email. And I know I shouldn't open
1:27:18 it and read it because once I read it, my brain kicks on and I start trying to solve the problem and I cannot go back to sleep. Yeah. And so I'll be up at the kitchen table at three or four AM,
1:27:28 like, you know, scrolling through this Excel sheet looking for it's like somebody sent it at nine o'clock because that's when they were able to get around to, you know, do in their part and reply
1:27:38 into the email. But then I read it at 2 am. for whatever reason. And then I'm like, I can't turn my brain back off. I have to finish the task. Yeah. Right. So I'm like, I'm like a semi-truck.
1:27:52 It takes me a little bit to get to sleep. But once I'm there, I'm there. And then I'm the same with work. It's, you know, if there's something that needs to be done, if it's mowing the yard or,
1:28:06 you know, riding a program or driving to a rig to, you know, help kill a well. Yeah. It's all I'm thinking about until that's done. Yeah. So in your, what did we say, 20 years, 19 years? 21.
1:28:22 21 years. How
1:28:26 much has changed?
1:28:29 Is your scope,
1:28:33 scope of work and materials used? materials used. and thought processes, 'cause you know, in 2006, 2007, like we were just kind of really getting into this whole shale idea, right? These
1:28:46 unconventionals. What's changed the most is we've gotten so efficient and we drill so
1:28:56 quick now that there has been a shift in mindset from a hydraulics point of view
1:29:05 There used to be a time where you wouldn't want a yield point which is a function of carrying capacity of your fluid. You
1:29:17 would not have wanted a yield point below a 14. And nowadays with how quick we're drilling with how quick we're pumping, in these, in these. unconventional else. You know, if we have a six, if
1:29:40 we have a seven, you know, it's our sweet spot. It's where we need to be. Interesting. And you know, so a lower your point
1:29:49 is less viscous. Doesn't carry as much. No, it'll, it'll, it'll carry just as much, but we're putting so much pump pressure on. Oh, we don't have to have as much. Okay. Right. And, and
1:30:02 we're, and, and also, you know, these, these, these laterals were the pipes laying on bottom and just crushing stuff up. So, you know, a lot of times you're moving silt. You aren't moving
1:30:17 solid cuttings. And
1:30:22 the, the technology advancements in, in tools and bits has, has spurred on.
1:30:35 Another way of thinking, it's changed the mindset of hydraulics in our world. Some of the chemicals are better. You know, my company has a chemical out
1:30:50 there, has a fluid system out there called Extendral that's mimicking
1:30:57 oil-based muds, the lubricity and everything. But it's a brine fluid, you know There have been, you know, the lab work that's done and the understanding that we have now
1:31:13 has changed, has changed and we'll continue to change. And we're
1:31:23 getting as efficient as other folks, as other folks in the industry, the tool guys, the rigs. The rigs are bigger, they're stronger. Yeah, well, no, they're getting smaller and they're
1:31:33 getting stronger. They're more nimble. Yeah, you know, we can walk, you know. The first rig I ever set on in East Texas in '06, you know, it had two D6 cats out there, you know, that slid it
1:31:50 over. You know, now it's like a transformer walking down the road. Yeah, yeah.
1:31:57 It's, you know, drilling completion's production It's a science and
1:32:07 we're getting really good at what we're doing. I mean, it's so good. We're, you know, some aspects, we're drilling ourselves out of a job 'cause we're getting so efficient. But that's where
1:32:18 bringing it full circle back to the conventional stuff. You know,
1:32:24 the unconventional technology improvements instructional technology improvements have
1:32:33 have only made it easier for us to do the conventional stuff. Gotcha. I look at programs like, had I
1:32:42 written you an 8, 000 foot Yayoa program
1:32:48 in 2005?
1:32:51 You know, probably around, you know, 10, two mud. You know, the properties aren't gonna change, but it would have probably been a90, 000, 100, 000 mud build in That's a 40, 45, 000, 50,
1:33:05 000 mud build now. Gotcha. Those efficiencies are transferring over to the conventional side. Very much so, you know, and, you know,
1:33:16 because of the speed and because of the
1:33:23 advancements that we've had on how quick we drill these things, you've had to get better with our chemicals So, you know, our Viscuit. our viscosifiers, we'll yield a little bit quicker now. And
1:33:35 just
1:33:40 across the board, we've gotten better.
1:33:45 We've gotten better from a chemical aspect, from product aspect, from a hydraulics aspect. We just know more now. And
1:33:55 also, whenever I first got, when I was on my first rig, I hand-wrote, and this wasn't the Stone Age, this was 2006, I hand-wrote a mud report and I faxed it in. I still remember the fax number,
1:34:12 I did it for six months. I faxed it in, it wasn't long after that, that I had a computer, but. Yeah, we already had blackberries in 2006. We did, yeah, it wasn't that long ago Yeah,
1:34:29 and also some operators will pay for things other operators. Right. We're still there. Yeah. Well, who knows? Some guys are still faxing stuff. My grandma still has a fax line. That she cost
1:34:40 her300 a month to keep that fax line open. And she's 92 90. She just turned 93. She won't get rid of it. She's like, I need that in case I got to send something to my account. And I'm like,
1:34:53 grandma, like, well, my wife is in my wife's in the medical world. And they still fax almost everything That's crazy. Well, because it's like a HIPAA. Oh, they don't want to digitize and save
1:35:06 the data. Save patient data stuff. I mean, you would think that they would find find another way to do it instead of having the old fax machine, but yeah, they still fax everything. Yeah. Now
1:35:18 she faxes it from her phone. She takes a picture PDF and has the effects. And does the effects. It's like Snapchat for professionals. I guess so. I guess so. Does it go away after five seconds?
1:35:31 I don't know. That's funny. You got my brain working on this thing. You said something about drill pipe laying on bottom.
1:35:41 And all the time you see like these directional tools going down the highway on hot shots. Yeah. And there's always that little bent sub, that little two degree bent sub. Yeah. And I always
1:35:51 thought like, if they have two degrees all the time, won't they just like drill in a circle? But when you said it's laying on bottom, you've got to hold that bit just far enough off bottom so that
1:36:02 it cuts so that the rest of your pipe can sit on bottom and slide. Yeah. And I've never reconciled those. Yeah, you still have stabilizers in there. They'll have different tools in there. Yeah.
1:36:13 But yeah, so - You got my brain just running away. If you are, if you have a 10, 000 foot lateral, by the time you reach TD, you know, let's just say it's 18, 000 foot measured depth, your 10,
1:36:26 000 foot lateral, two-thirds of that. pipe or three quarters of that pipe is sitting on the bottom of that hole. And dragging. And just dragging and just constantly grinding up.
1:36:42 Yeah, which is an interesting thought then 'cause you've got connections and collars and you're pushing that pipe along there. And so your hole is no longer around by the time you get to TD at the
1:36:55 heel. It's very popular What would a circle with an oval be? Yeah, yeah. Yup.
1:37:05 And, you know, there's, you know, one thing we haven't touched on is stuck pipe. You know, there's a couple ways to get stuck, but one of those is key seating. And it's basically you've made,
1:37:16 you know, you see how a key fits in. Yeah. You know, your tools have made an indention into the formation to where you get caught up and you can't pull back out. And you can't pull that reamer
1:37:27 back through it Correct.
1:37:31 And you see that more in a curve, you know?
1:37:35 And then you can also see that, you can also see that happen when you will have like a light or heavy spot in your fluid. And then it will diff like that one little
1:37:50 light column that goes through there, differentially sucks that tool up against key seat that it's already made and you can't get it out Interesting. Yeah. So then y'all just sit on bottom and
1:38:04 circulate. Well, you sit on bottom and circulate. And there's chemicals you can pump. You can, there's - Friction reducers and stuff like that. There's friction reducers.
1:38:14 There's a, there's kind of an industry standard product that they're called Blackmagic that you know, it's meant to eat away the wall cake. So you can get out. So you can get out.
1:38:30 But then you know, call a fish and tool hand and yeah, and you know, he cranks on it for a day or eight. Yeah, whatever the insurance come, whatever, whatever that tool down hole costs is, is
1:38:42 predicates, how, how long have I still been trying to get it out cranking on it? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wouldn't that be the worst? You spend a million dollars trying to get it out and you still don't?
1:38:53 Well, you have to pay a million dollars for the tool I do know this. I do know this is that nine out of 10 times, if you're going to put a million dollar tool down hole, you've had that tool
1:39:03 insured, right? Yeah. And then the insurance company, I mean, I've had, I've had them. I've heard this dozens of times. Insurance company says we have to take at least two more runs out of it.
1:39:16 You know, gotcha. So it's gotcha So do you keep as a, as a mud engineer on location? People would call you a mud engineer, mud man? My guy, my engineer. My guy. You keep notes in a tally book?
1:39:33 Yeah. That's standard for y'all as well. I have a tally book in my truck right now. Gotcha. I keep notes, I've used a tally book for so long that
1:39:44 I keep, I keep it on me and I've like, notes
1:39:49 in my little kids literally games on it. Well, I just find it interesting that like, from geologists through production guys, like everybody uses a tally book, very few people actually keep
1:40:03 tallies in them anymore, but it's just like the industry standard notebook for us. Yeah, I remember it. And I love it. I got, so there's a, it's called mud school. You go to it,
1:40:15 mine, Baker uses like three and a half months long and then they just send you out to rig. You don't know anything, you've just been in school
1:40:26 You know, you know, you know, you know the math. But I remember the night before going out to my first rig ever, I had written 60 pages of notes in this tally book. And
1:40:42 I get out there and somebody asked me a question. I was like, yeah, and I would refer to it, but I would try and not let them see what I was doing. Yeah. I remember hiding in the pump room,
1:40:54 like looking up stuff. Yeah, 'cause you're told at the time it was offshore, and I was 22 years old, and you know - And it was trial by fire. And they always say, Hey, tell 'em you've been
1:41:05 doing thisfor three years. Yeah, right, right. Even at Baker Halliburton, they tell you to say that. Oh, yeah. Tell 'em you've been doing this for three years. Luckily, I remember it was
1:41:15 cold,
1:41:18 and I had a jacket, and I was able to keep my tally, I kept a second tally book in there. Yeah But no, and, you know, from a mud engineer. aspects.
1:41:33 You take your sample, you run in,
1:41:37 you write down, you run your checks, you run your tests, and everything goes into that tally book. So I can go back three days and see what at this depth, even though I put it onto a report and
1:41:49 send that
1:41:51 in. But it's in my pocket. And if I'm on the rig floor and the company man, what were we doing at 14, 000 foot? What were you doing? Well, it's right here. And then you're worried about
1:42:05 bottoms up. You send a sweep. You've calculated it's going to take 3, 200 strokes. Yeah, how do you calculate like, how do you calculate like, wash out and like the size of that hole really is
1:42:20 versus the size of the hole you theoretically drilled? You can't until you get the log back. The rule of thumb is five. We've washed out 5. Oh, okay. That's what I've always used. Gotcha. So
1:42:34 sometimes it's 2, sometimes it's 8. But you don't know real time. Okay. So you always just account for 5. And then in the mud world, it's not gonna, you know, pumping an extra 400 strokes is
1:42:53 never gonna kill you. If anything, you could double that. Always wanna pump a little extra Yeah, you always round up. Yeah. Always round up. Same thing with calculating a kill mud weight.
1:43:04 Always round up.
1:43:07 If your kill mud weight says it's 1622, well it's
1:43:14 163. Yeah, that's the mud weight we're going after. Yeah, 834. Yeah. Not 833, huh? I just, it's that number stuck in my head, just 005 to tie, you know, all the, all the constants. you
1:43:29 know, and, and, you know, reality, not all fresh water is the same, you know? Right. Right. So, but it's so, it's, it's a,
1:43:39 I love how just like the, the principles stay the same. The physics stays the same from one end of our industry, the other science, like the, the little bits of knowledge on how we do things,
1:43:54 how we want to go about it. You know, those are things that we have to hand down and hand over to other guys. But like the physics of it always stays the same, right? No matter which end you're
1:44:06 on, and I love that. I think it's cool because we can have a conversation and understand, you know, hydrostatic pressure. It's not from, you're into the well, to mind of the well, it's not any
1:44:18 different. No, no, correct. And it allows us to talk efficiently. So when we're, when we're able to write those things down in a way that, I don't know, maybe I'm just being sentimental whole
1:44:28 idea of science, right? But like, when you can write down something and I can read it two and three and 20 and a hundred years later, and I understand it, because the physics has not changed.
1:44:41 That's cool to me. Yeah, I mean, and the math is the math, and a constant is a constant, right? Like hydrostatic,
1:44:50 0052 times TVD, times mudweight. That's going to give me my hydrostatic pressure at every single foot of that well. Yeah.
1:44:59 Yeah, there's there's
1:45:03 there's something to be said about, you know, you can you can talk to you can talk to a
1:45:11 90 year old company man. Yeah, and you could Hey, what's hydrostatic pressure? He'll tell you the formula. He talked to a kid in his third year petroleum engineering school at Texas Tech. He'll
1:45:24 tell you the same thing. Yeah, so universal It is still very much so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:45:35 Huh.
1:45:38 What's your plans? What are you trying to do? For today, this week? No, no, no. What's - what is Reed Goodman's professional goal in this oil film?
1:45:53 Every year
1:45:56 at Christmas time. South Texas Geologic Society, and maybe the AADE chapter, and the SP, or whoever. They have like a multi-society
1:46:12 Christmas party at the petroleum club in San Antonio, right? And normally, like, we want to have a, you know, clean your hat, shine your boots, you know, try to look pretty decent for it and
1:46:23 everything
1:46:25 I don't want to get to a place where I can show up. to that in a Hawaiian shirt and flip flops. Be like, yo, I'm here. Like, I don't have to play your gamer and press anybody. That's read
1:46:38 Goodman. He can wear whatever the good one wants. That's
1:46:45 my aspiration. And I don't know if that's a,
1:46:49 I don't know if that's a certain amount of money or if that's a certain amount of years and knowledge. Or if that's just a place you get to at some point in your age Usually a combination,
1:47:00 combination of success. Yeah. Whether success leads to money or not. People respect success. I feel like I'm already trending that way just in my attitude towards a lot of things. But really,
1:47:19 I enjoy learning about it. All these different things. And I enjoy the science projects. And I think largely I want enough. production that it can afford my science projects. Okay. So I want to
1:47:33 frack this thing with something weird. I can go do it and then not change what I have for dinner. Yeah. But I want to go drill a well over here. I can go do it. If you call me and say, Hey,
1:47:43 dude, I've got this, I've got this whole entirely new system, you know, we're going to base it on, I don't know, elk piss. Yeah. And I'm like, Cool, go get a thousand elk and let's, you
1:47:54 know, collect their urine. I'll go help procure them. That's what I'm saying And so, you know, I wanna be in a place where I can go do those science projects. 'Cause to me, that's the fun.
1:48:06 Like, I love oil and gas because I get to learn so stinking much all the time. And
1:48:14 second to that, when I have my boat hooked up to my truck, I wanna actually be able to go duck huntinggasp
1:48:24 you know, we could be doing this from the duck line. I want to be able to make that happen.
1:48:31 I know that's kind of like vague, but like largely those are, I don't know exactly how that looks. And when I look at a lot of people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, like guys that have really made it
1:48:42 and you start to talk to them and hear their story or how things evolved for them Rarely is it linear and rarely did they understand what was happening to them at the time. You know, they didn't
1:48:58 decide to go be friends with this investor and he stayed their investor for 50 years. Yeah. It's like, I met this dude at a bar and we got to be friends and then he invested in one while and now
1:49:11 we've been partners for 50 years, you know, like we made it together. And so I've kind of given up the idea of having like, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this. I'm chasing
1:49:24 the things that excite me. Yeah. And good for you. Trying to make enough money in the meantime to, you know, pay the bills. Support a family. Keep a roof over the heads. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
1:49:37 Maybe it's maybe a steak dinner every now and then. It's kind of nice. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So what's a what's Blake shooting for?
1:49:51 Yeah, I got some people who work for me, my engineers who have worked for me for a while now. And, you know, I've done a good job of keeping food on their tables. Yeah. And, you know, I guess
1:50:05 at the end of the day, you know, I'm never going to unless I buy you into something, but I'm never going to be, you know, have production. But at the end of the day, if there are, you know,
1:50:18 if I'm able to watch some kids, walk across the college. you know, stage with the diploma. No, watch mine definitely or, you know, watch him walk, you know, start up a welding career or
1:50:31 something. I mean, you know, just taking care of the people around me. Yeah. Taking care of those, and some of those are operators, you know, I've got a couple of good friends who, who, you
1:50:44 know, they're drilling wells. And I have as much invested, you know, in here as they have Right. You know, maybe not in the wallet, but,
1:50:56 you know, just have at the end of the day, just like you, know, you can have that same respect that you have, or be able to, you know, walking in there in a Hawaiian shirt with socks on and
1:51:11 flip-flops. Yeah. You know, it's - You gotta draw lights over, socks and flip-flops. No, no, no, I need the socks and maybe like the Birkin, like the Birkenstocks, as you see and
1:51:23 You know, it's it's at the end of the day just You know be able to look back and say, you know did some good work help some people and yeah, and Had a nice career. Yeah, I Would though the last
1:51:38 thing I do in the mud world is I'd like to go back to a rig for one week and just play Mud Engineer one more time. Just do it only have to worry about one rig. Yeah one well Just take care of that
1:51:50 one well boy Isn't it funny how like
1:51:56 I can think of one of the first gas lift systems I ran in and Man, I was going back and forth with my numbers and I kept forgetting to add The gas live valve in And so by the time we got to the top
1:52:12 of the string everything was I Don't know 50 60 feet off mmm, and then I was like, oh shit like I realized it like at the last valve, right? And I was stressed out as could be. It's like, it's a
1:52:24 gas system. If it's like plus or minus 50 feet, it'll work. Yeah. If it's plus or minus 100 feet, it'll probably work. But I was so stressed out and like to think now about like sitting there
1:52:37 and running that system, how I would be watching Netflix. And like, I'd scribble it all down in three or four minutes and I'd just wait for that flag to come up, you know, and put my Netflix on
1:52:48 pause and I'm like, how easy it is now versus how stressful and hard it was then. Well, that's, I was the same way, but you know, you put, you put the stress on yourself for, you know, for a
1:53:00 good reason. Yeah. Yeah, you wanted to do a good job. And I remember a lot of that though, not sleeping, man. I had trouble sleeping for like the first three years. I always thought something
1:53:11 was gonna go wrong. Yeah. You know, and you know, very rarely did it Yeah, do you ever have any big? Incidents or like real? Yeah,
1:53:25 I mean, I've been on a few blowouts. I haven't been on a whole lot of stuck pipes, but there's been times where, you know, we've drilled into caverns and just lost at all. At the same time, you
1:53:36 know, getting 6, 000 years gas back and go Western real quick. Yeah. But that's,
1:53:46 you know, that's, uh, and then I look back now and, you know, lessons learned from that, uh, and I use that to kind of calm down some of, uh, some of the younger men engineers out there is,
1:53:57 hey, you know, if I didn't die then, you aren't dying now. Right. Right. We had a, uh, not long ago, uh, I'm not going to say the operator or the, or, or the rig, but there was a spark,
1:54:10 uh, one of the, one of the lights over the shaker house on the shaker house sparked. caught the rig on fire, the whole damn thing. Really? Yeah. And - They lose the rig? They lost most of it.
1:54:26 They kept it, the Derek and everything was fine. The whole pit system was gone. There was some SCR house issues that happened with blowback from electricity, but - Yeah.
1:54:41 Yeah, no, it's,
1:54:45 it's
1:54:47 nothing, nothing too crazy. Yeah. Or nothing that I think's crazy now at the time. I prayed and sleep over, didn't sleep for two days, thinking about it. Yeah, yeah. No, I like that answer,
1:54:60 that the people around you are taking care of, 'cause that's just,
1:55:04 you know, a lot of
1:55:07 the people that we have continued, my wife and I have continued to be friends with Like there's people that come and go in your life, right? The people we've continued to be friends with are all
1:55:18 those kind of people. It's like, you know, if they have money, everybody has money. If they have a camper, everybody has a camper. They have a boat, everybody has a boat. Like,
1:55:30 you know, sharing that time and those experiences, I have a hard time with that. Like hunting and fishing, I love, right? But so rarely will I go by myself. Yeah. 'Cause like, if I can't
1:55:43 really share this with anybody, why am I out here doing this? Yeah. Like if I don't have this memory, like,
1:55:49 I'm not that mad at the ducks. No, no, and you're like, I don't hate fish that bad. Right. You know? Yeah, I'm out there, you know, fishing with buddies. I'm out there, you know, drinking
1:56:01 beer, you know, on a golf course or, you know, I'm really into sporting clays. You are. Yeah, I love sporting clays. Ski, you know, trap, all the above. And, you know, they're at Corpus
1:56:16 Christi, a gun club. You know, you can go out there and there's automated time, pullers. You can go out and shoot by yourself. Yeah. Hate doing it. Yeah. Hate doing it. I can imagine. Yeah,
1:56:29 I mean, you just say pull and then a second and a half later, they pull. Yeah. But, what's fun in that? I'm gonna make you real sad real quick. What do you got?
1:56:44 I'll tell this whole story. Let's just back it up, story time. Okay. 2017, I had three engineers in their wives, two engineers in their wives, maybe three. I don't know. I had a couple of
1:56:56 engineers in their wives wanna go crane hunting. Okay, we're living in Midland, wanted to go Sandhill Crane hunting. This company I was with, my boss was always like, you could take, you go to
1:57:08 the moon if you wanted to, as long as you take an engineer with you. Thank you customer. All right, let's go. We went to Intel crane hunting and in college I had bought this duck commander
1:57:19 Mossberg 500 the command tradition. It came with an American flag bandana You know like so you could be old willy robert just like you're willy and Anyways, I bought that in college and I used it as
1:57:30 a boat paddle and I used it as a you know a door prop And I yeah shot a lot of ducks with it and um We go on this crane hunt Those two guys their wives my wife and I These cranes come around. There's
1:57:44 like 40 of them, right?
1:57:48 Guide y'all's cut them. We all stand up And that gun had been having some issues where that I think that firing pin was just getting a little short Yeah, and it's shoot two out of three shells maybe
1:57:58 three out of four shells Yeah, so I have we've got three shells in the gun, right? So I shoot and he goes click and I put another one in click. I put a third one in it goes click Thank you.
1:58:11 Because there were so many people and nobody noticed that I hadn't shot except for my wife. Yeah, 'cause everybody's bang, bang, bang, right? And then after everything dies down, she looks over
1:58:22 and she goes, Well, that's really embarrassing. And I was like, you had to say something? Yeah, it wasn't until you just said that. So after that, she agreed to buy me a shotgun. Okay. Okay,
1:58:36 so we're hunting cranes, right? I like to duck hunt
1:58:41 So we go to buy a shotgun. I really wanted a 28 gauge. So we go to this place in San Antonio, they'll let you buy a used gun and go shoot it, see how it fits you like it. And if you don't like it,
1:58:53 you can get your full money back towards another gun. Yeah.
1:58:57 And so I went and shot three or four different 28 gauges and really liked this Benelli ethos. Okay, nice gun. The Benelli ethos, barely nice, not like, you know, a cry golf or anything, but
1:59:06 like a very respectable gun I was doing sales and needed to, you know. not have my Mossberg 500 Willy Roberts in addition, you know? And so, um, so we buy this gun and, uh,
1:59:22 you can't, you can't get like two shot for 28 gauge. No, like the best I found is four shot. Really? So I've been shooting ducks with four shot for last couple of years, but I won't take it to
1:59:34 the coast. Um, well, in a lapse of judgment, the one hunt I went on, during that four days, about two weeks ago, um, I went down to Wilson's cut. Yeah, at a corpus. Yeah, just me and the
1:59:49 dog and the gun and we'd go out and find a blind and
1:59:55 my dog is like four, five months old and I just lost my dog of 13 years. And a couple of months ago, anyways, my dog of five months old is with me. And so she's swimming in the water and she gets
2:00:07 in the blind and she shakes all over my gun and gets that saltwater on there. And I'm like, all right, I know I've got to wipe this down as soon as I get to the truck. Two hours, two hours to get
2:00:19 to the truck. I go to wipe it down when I get back to the truck. It's next morning. It's already starting to eat through the bluing. I was like, oh, the one time. And it's rusting already, and
2:00:29 I was so mad at myself. So, semi-automatic duck hunting on the coast, I treat it like I treat it like I treat a TV these days You can go to Sam's and buy a 50-inch TV for199 on
2:00:49 Black Friday. If I need another TV, you know, I just go buy199 TV. I'll put it outside. It's199 TV.
2:01:00 Duck hunting on the coast, you go buy the cheap gun. Yeah. Go buy the cheap gun. Mossberg just3, 500.
2:01:13 Just get the tri-star or whatever. Or buy you a300 gun. Yeah. Try to keep it clean. Yeah. But if it lasts you two years. You're, you're happy with it. You got your money out of it. Yeah. So
2:01:22 now I've, I'm looking for somebody to work on the bluing on that gun. Cause I want to, I want to put it back into good condition. Yeah, I know some guys. I'll, I'll, I'll give you. You'll
2:01:31 have to hook me up. We don't need to bore all these guys with it, but I figured I'd share my sob story with you Yeah. That's bad. That's unfortunate. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the, that happened
2:01:43 because you were down there by yourself. That's what
2:01:49 it is. Even with the buddy. Had Blake said, yes, the day I wanted to get it. I had to work. I don't know what I was doing that day. I think I was a kid's school event or something. That's more
2:01:58 important for sure. That depends on the event. Yeah. So, well, appreciate it coming out read it's been great. I, a great conversation. Glad we got to, glad we got to do this. No been talking
2:02:14 about it for a month or two. Yeah, yeah, it's been a minute. And once split is up, we will go get in the duck line. Yeah, maybe, maybe next time, you know, you get in one of these with Craig
2:02:25 and then, you know, after that, then me, you and Craig. Well, we can cut up. That'll be good, that'll be good. Well, we're, are you on LinkedIn?
2:02:36 Yeah, I'm on
2:02:38 LinkedIn People want to get a hold of you, buy some drill and fluids. Yeah, just. Now buy some drill. People want to go ski-shoot and sport and clays. Yeah, I know. And they get a hold of you.
2:02:47 I mean, just Blake Mosley, you
2:02:51 know, I don't know my LinkedIn info, not on Facebook. Don't do all that stuff. Good. But, you know, work for Genesis Fluids. I'm in South Texas. Cool. You know, the mud world's small. If
2:03:04 you ask somebody, ask somebody. Yeah, they'll be able to get you to me. Yeah. But appreciate it. Awesome. Yeah, thanks.