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Welcome to Energy 101 with Julie McLelland and Jacob Stiller. Join us on our mission to help raise the world's energy IQ.
0:00 Hey, everyone, welcome back to Energy 101. Today, we have Dana and Ryan from Well Control School. And we're going to learn all about Well Control. So why don't we kick things off in a very
0:14 simple way? I think if I were to try and guess, what does Well Control mean? I think it's pretty self-explanatory.
0:21 There's a Well on site, and we want to control it. I think the name says it all right It's the idea of keeping basically the well in control from the sense of keeping it down-hole, right? However,
0:39 we can do, keep the formation pressures, the fluids, whatever may be coming into that well board, down-hole, and a lot of people think, oh, well, that's why we have a stat or we have a BOP.
0:49 But really, when it comes to Well Control, it's more about hydrostatic pressure and fluids doing the majority of the work I've learned that there's a lot going on down there. You know, you kind of
1:00 just picture like just a canal in the ground and it's full of oil, but no, it's full of gas. It's full of pressure. And we're talking PSI in the tens of thousands, like it's pretty dangerous.
1:12 You've been here in Houston, you think about it. If we laid a three mile road out, we crossed through how many neighborhoods, right? Well when, we put drill three miles down and out, we're
1:22 crossing through a lot of ways neighborhoods, right? All these different formations that have all these different contaminants, fluids, water inside of them. And our goal is not to put anything
1:39 into them, but also not to allow them to come into the well more. So we keep stability and we prevent flow. So if I'm going on a site and I'm like, who's in charge of well control? Is it just
1:54 kind of like the thought of well control? These are actual people at a job.
1:58 Or is it just a standard, like what exactly would you say someone on site is doing with well control? It's everyone. And that's one of the most important factors to well control, it's not just one
2:07 person. It is the entire crew's responsibility for well control. From the greenest individual on site, all the way up to the most experienced and how they work together and how they interact. Not
2:22 everybody can see everything at all times And so you are the eyes, you are the ears. And a lot of times you're the voice of prevention because it takes all of them to recognize, then react and then
2:36 get the well shut in. You're gonna have a site supervisor everywhere. Somebody is representing the contractor, the owner. But each job out there, the guy that's working what we call the pits,
2:53 watching the fluid in the pits.
2:58 You know, that's all, that's his whole job. Adding minerals or adding stuff to it. One, his boss tells him to, but he's got a part to play in well control 'cause he can notice little bubbles in
3:12 the pits, all of a sudden. He needs to know that he needs to tell somebody about
3:18 that. You got a guy
3:21 at the pipe rack when they're pulling pipe out and laying it down and he's got to clean the threads and put the thread protector. He might say a washout starting on some of the threads, some of the
3:34 connection. He's got to report that. So it's a team effort. The driller up on the floor has the biggest responsibility 'cause he's operating, the turning, the bid, he's watching the bid go down,
3:47 he's working to break, and he's watching gauges, watching pressure gauges constantly, And he's got to be aware of these other things out there that are going on that his men are telling him and
4:01 he's the one that says, shut it down, we got a problem. Then the supervisors come in and. And it's a very unique motion because it is. It's, it is all the hands. It's the Derek hand, right?
4:15 And the Derek hands yelling, Hey, it looks like the pits are coming up Or, Hey, we look, we have some additional flow and all of a sudden the driller is going to verify first. They're going to
4:24 always pick up, shut the pumps off, verify that they have flow with the pumps off. And then if they do, no questions asked shut in. And a lot of times if there's still questions, the safest
4:37 thing to always do is shut that well in, always secure it Most of the time when we see incidents and accidents that have occurred, blowouts that have occurred, it was always saying, well, I
4:50 wanted to ask the tool pusher. I wanted to ask the company man before I shut it in. that latency and shutting the well in becomes one of the most deadly things we do out there. Yeah, so I'm
5:01 hearing that we, you know, we're talking, this is what's happening on a site right now, right? West Texas, the Marcellus, wherever, this is happening. And what I'm hearing is that this is all
5:14 humans in control. Like we're in an era where there's a lot of machines and automation, AI, whatever, but you're describing like 100 manpower So like, there's got to be tools helping out.
5:28 There's got to be, you know, the humans are working with it. Maybe there is automation. Like what are the non-humans doing to also help prevent and work together and get ready to hit that big red
5:39 button? We get the sensors, right? We got the flow sensors, we have the pit sensors. We're, yeah, they're telling us, hey, I've got an increase flow or a decrease flow. Got an increase in
5:48 pits or a decrease in the pits. But it's still a lot of still the old style, especially in US land today. It's, you know, we have accumulator packages and accumulator to stored energy that closes
6:02 the BOP end. So when it comes time, you know, we're using that accumulator, we're throwing from a remote panel, we're closing it and, you know, sub C, we get more teching, right? We get more,
6:14 you know, automated when we look at the sub C end of it And on the US land, really, it's not that, you know, not that far advanced when we look at tech, it would be saying what AI is today
6:29 compared to probably 2007, right, where there's an idea, but it's not there yet. Yeah. So you're saying that even at everything's kind of advanced in general, we're still trusting to humans more
6:43 like we could talk about it later, maybe the future and what we can assume will be more automated. But for now, like, you're saying a lot, you are saying there are tools and automation happening.
6:53 Like, BOP is a big one you're saying. In fact, I've been bringing up this every episode 'cause it helps, but I was out in Midland on a frack spread, a drilling rig, and even like a whole bed of
7:05 pads of pump jacks. And when we're at the frack spread, they had the BOPs hanging on cranes above the frack trees. And they were using a lot of jargon to explain to the TCU students, but maybe
7:18 could you help me recap from there? You're on a frack spread. You see the trees sticking out the ground and there's a BOP on a crane floating above it, ready to do something. What is that device?
7:28 So that BOP is what's going to secure that well. At that point, what they were doing was they're probably finishing completion. They would have had a wire line on it or quilt tubing on it. So they
7:38 had to move that specific stack off and then put the well head back on depending on what they were getting ready to do So they'll set that BOP stack or tree depending on. you know, what it was back
7:51 down on it. They don't want to break it down. They don't want to set it down because it's already been tested, right? If you had set it down and break it apart, then you'd have to go back in and
7:59 retest every one of those fittings. They know that once they set it down, the only thing they have to test is the two flanges that come together. So that's what a lot of times they pick them up
8:09 like that and then put them back. And so BOP stands for blow up prevention. Blow up preventers. So, and what I heard is like, they're there It's, it's well controlled, right? Like they, it's
8:21 there and I hope they don't have to use it basically. Well, yes, they hope they don't have to use it, right? But it's also one of these that they're not afraid to use it. 'Cause in most cases we,
8:33 you know, we'll strip or run through our annulars. We'll function our pipe rams, you know, we'll do different things and we'll utilize them at times during our drilling activities, it's normal
8:44 operations So yeah, I may bring a caller up. Yeah, we're tool joint and snug into it so I can prevent it from falling down hole in case something would happen up top, right? We don't want to lose
8:56 a pipe down hole. So there's different ways a BOP can work in a common way, not just for that emergency. It's just the main part of what our drilling stack is. And the BOP is also part of the
9:09 conduit that takes the fluid or whatever it's coming out of the will to wherever needs to go to the pits or to the gas bus through my gas separator. So, but it has to flow through the BOP. That way,
9:24 if there is a problem, when you say close the BOP, you're closing that closing off that outflow. You're studying, you know, you're preventing a kick or if we have a leech hole or the BOP, we
9:38 have a problem because we have no quick way to shut it down at that point. So we have to reclaim control some other way. So. we try to keep everything flowing up and through it. So if we wash
9:51 something out up top, we can easily close, shut in, and we won't lose. And how long has this, has like this device been around? Like, and what were y'all doing before it existed? Burning?
10:03 Yeah, actually, I mean, I 30s the, know you, to back going we're,, 40s. You know,
10:11 what looked like a modern day today in some ways, except had long wheels on it would have been your, you know, starting in your 50s. But what do you see, you know, everybody talks about they hit
10:21 a gush or they didn't have BOPs. And that's what they would actually do. They would just go out there, you know, they would hit natural and it'd flow up. And that's what they wanted. And all of
10:33 a sudden, sometimes they catch it on fire, sometimes they'd go in and put a big valve on it and shut it in if they could. So there's a lot of different angles to it But he's, I guess that's,
10:45 that's the beginning of pressure control, right, and how do I get into it? Because it's the way they drilled was completely different as well, so. You said the word kick earlier. That's a word I
10:55 hear, not just talking to people like you, but I hear it on all the podcast, I edit, and panels and stuff. What is a kick? And I have a few more of these terms I might need to describe to me. A
11:07 kick is an influx. And what do we mean is it's something that's come into that well bore, and it's coming to see us, right? That's the best way to look at it. So you see it on like the monitors,
11:20 all right? No, how we have to see it is anything that comes in. I have a barrel that comes in and a barrel comes out, right? So my pit level should always stay exactly the same. But the moment
11:33 that my pit level goes up and it goes up two barrels, I mean, a kick has come in. I mean, two barrels of something now has come into the well bore and it's displaced an additional two out. And
11:44 now I have something coming out, and most of the time we're looking at that as being some sort of hydrocarbon or water flow, but most commonly it's methane, it's gas. And what the difference is
12:01 when we talk kick and everybody thinks methane, they take worst case scenario, is because gas doesn't just stay in a single bubble. Gas expands and it continues to push out Now, we talked earlier
12:15 that we depend on hydrostatic and hydrostatic pressure to keep everything in control. So as that gas starts pushing out, we start losing more fluid, we lose more hydrostatic pressure, which means
12:27 more gas can come in. They're very complicated, but you're really dumbing it down in a really good way. Let's get into maybe kind of like what y'all are doing now, which is well-controlled school
12:40 So, uh, basically, I mean, This is something that where y'all are certifying people in well control, safety. And I mean, let's break down like, what are these courses? What are they learning?
12:55 I think what I think of first is like, OSHA is like this federal thing that's like safety and stuff. Is it kind of like that or is it its own thing? Well, we're accredited by two different bodies
13:08 to teach. They set the curriculum that we have to teach to. And they level it out. Like in the drilling side, there's three levels, introductory, we'll start with introductory. And then at the
13:26 mid-level or drilling, drill our level and then a supervisor level. So each level
13:34 has objectives, training objectives they have to learn and be tested to.
13:42 uh, the work well intervention, the, the things that go on after a well is completed. Those guys have their own, their set of standards they have to meet. And they're basically two, well,
14:00 three levels of introductory. There's an operator level. That's the guy say on a coral tubing unit that's operating the unit, the levers and lowering the call and doing all he's got to be. He's
14:13 got things he's got to be certified at. And then your super your site supervisor has things he has to be several hours to certify that.
14:28 So that's the operator and supervisor level for the workover people did. And we look at also mainly everything's built for land. that you can add sub C as well. So that would be the addition to the
14:47 level. So if I was taking a drilling course, I could have drilling and that would just be for land or I could take drilling with sub C and then that would get them ready for the sub C stack and
14:58 everything from there. So there's a couple of courses y'all mentioned that before we shot there's that, it's like a couple acronyms, what are those? IEDC. Yeah, what is that exactly? The
15:10 International Association of Drilling Contractors. IEDC is our governing body when it comes to drilling here in the United States. Basically, well, in all over the world, right? They help mold
15:25 and move forward new regulations. Make sure that we're all working at a very safe and productive standard.
15:35 And they guide us in the well control training aspect as well. They set what that curriculum must be, you know. They tell us what topics have to be taught. IWCIF is the International Well Control
15:50 Forum and they're more of a European-based. They are all over the world, just the same as IADC, but they focus more on North Sea, you know, European Union, that side. And they,
16:08 there's really, they always joke, well-controlled, well-controlled, it doesn't matter, pound per gallon times 0052 times TVD, does not change depending on which one you take, right? But it's
16:22 how it relates to necessarily the people, right? So IADC really relates to the US. and all of the US. basins very well in South America and the Gulf of America, right? Yeah, they really have
16:38 cornered that market.
16:41 These are mandatory courses to work in the field, basically. It's for if you're going to work offshore, yes. Um, if you're going to work for some companies, yes, uh, insurance companies right
16:56 now are the ones putting a big push towards everyone, making sure they have it. What they found is instant rates decrease dramatically if all the crew has a well controlled certification. So, yeah,
17:09 so it's the betterment of the industry. Most states say they need to have some sort of formal training. Uh, some states will lay it out. You must have an IEDC, you know, or an IWCF equivalent
17:22 training to, uh, to be able to work in that state. I feel like it's, there's a lot going on. I mean, just middling alone. There's so many drill sites and stuff like that You know, I've learned
17:34 that rough next, they can, they can get hired right out of high school and just start working, you know, on a rig
17:42 like are all these guys going through proper training and courses, or is there like small operators who are trying to get away with it, maybe audited? Like what does it look from that level all the
17:53 way up to the majors working for Exxon and BP? They're not all going through it. And that's a problem? Yeah, well,
18:08 it is when a well blows up. Of course. Somebody gets hurt, but the smaller operators, smaller companies can't really afford to send their guys to formal training. And then also, they're not
18:21 pressured by any regulatory body to get trained. You know, it's a, I guess, if they have insurance, their insurance company is, unfortunately, I hate to submit it,
18:32 but there's companies out there that
18:38 are just weighing it, but you know, they get hired to do a job and they cross their fingers. They'll get it done safe, you know, nobody gets hurt. West Texas in the unique end is unique in
18:49 itself, right? It is not the model for the rest of the United States. In most places, if you go to be at Northeast in the Utica Marcellus and you're gonna have the Paterson's, yeah, you're gonna
19:03 have the neighbors, you're gonna have the positions. And they all, every one of their guys takes training, right? So it depends on what groups. And don't get me wrong, the new hires, the
19:16 roused abouts that go out there, they may not need this kind of training. They're all in sacks of stuff across the location. They're taking pipe threads off a pipe and hoping the threads. They're
19:32 told what to do every second of the day. And probably 67 of them, make one hit so they never come back. It's a rite of passage. I mean, yeah, I remember my first well-controlled class. If they
19:47 even make one, right? But it was a big thing because you knew now that you belonged. Hey, I got to go to well-control, right? That means somebody thinks I'm worth being here. And that was
20:02 always kind of that. They spent a little money on you. They trained you. Yeah. And it really means something to a lot of these guys when they come in, yeah. And they go through these courses,
20:12 especially those guys, it's the first time. Yeah, we're even their second time because they're really taking it in. They're really learning a lot. And they're learning about things that nobody's
20:24 necessarily showed them because we've had such a turnover in the industry. That idea that we had those mentors, like a lot of the times that Dan and I grew up what we had guys who were there to show
20:34 us, right? And so, at that time. Those were our teachers. Our problem with it today is this workforce is changing so fast. You don't get a chance to get to know somebody's name. Now that's
20:48 where this formal training has to be in place even much earlier. So. Yeah, I mean, you go to a site and they keep a tight crew, right? Like you're looking at a few rough necks, a driller, some
21:01 of those other names I can't remember. I mean, most sites I say wouldn't even have 10 people on, right? And yeah, like maybe there's some mundane tasks. They spend a lot of their time cleaning.
21:11 They're always on, you know, 24 hours. But at the end of the day, they are tens of thousands of feet in the ground. One little mistake can cost millions of dollars. Like it's like a weird mix of
21:24 like, a lot of the time they're kind of just doing something you can learn in a day. But it's also the stakes are so high. Of course you need all this training. I think one of the toughest and I
21:35 hate to, Correct you on that. Okay. One of the things though is a lot of people go, Oh, I could learn this and dare, I could do this someday. And I think that any true driller out there would
21:47 tell you an entire lifetime. I'll never know completely my job because everything changes so rapidly and so quickly. Every well that we drill is so different at times. Yeah, and that's where this
22:01 last few years have been to the point because of the shale revolution It's so different because it's been, hey, how fast can we pop at the analytics are coming in? Let's do more, let's do more.
22:13 But reality is we're gonna move into new markets. We're gonna move into new basins and new areas as some of this starts planing out. And all of a sudden these guys have been doing exactly the same
22:27 thing over and over again. We're not have to remember what well control was, how to do these jobs, what are the unexpected? 'Cause today it's like putting it on autopilot, right? It's no
22:38 different than flying from here to Chicago. You know, the guy in the front is just hitting the button. And the only important part is when he's landing and they're taking off, right? And that's
22:46 kind of it. When they're tripping out of the hole or running back in, that's about it. Yeah. And everything else is just, let's roll. Yeah, no, that's, I mean, I'm the layman. I'm coming
22:56 from, you know, what I perceive or what I hear. And, you know, maybe there's some people in the industry who kind of say it like that, but they don't really mean it that way But, I mean, yeah,
23:06 so there is a lot of precaution and training involved in. I mean, let's maybe talk more specifically. Like, if I'm picturing like taking a course, let's compare to like a bartender, like in
23:18 Texas or by state, you know, if you wanna be a bartender or a waiter and you have to legally serve alcohol, you do a little test through TABC. It's like a day or two or whatever, and you refresh
23:27 it every two years. So it's like a nice little thing, but it's kind of like a questionnaire. It takes like 30 minutes and you pass So I'm assuming. when it comes to low control, it's that times a
23:40 thousand, right? So what does it look like? Like from maybe sit down on a laptop, answer some questions, maybe some actual live demos to like straight-on simulators and stuff. Like what does it
23:52 look like when you're, when you're taking - Loose all of that. Yeah. If you're talking a live class, which can be virtually, it can be online, but it's still live, you have a live instructor,
24:08 and he's taking you through all the learning objectives one at a time, when it's necessary to put you on a simulator to show you what he's trying to say, he'll put you on a simulator. If it's,
24:24 there's homework, you have to do. There's,
24:30 in the class itself, There's interaction.
24:36 You might get one student talking about a topic and how he approached it in the field, a problem he approached. And this other student had a similar problem, but he approached it different. And
24:49 they get talking and it still comes out to learning
24:55 well control, but it's all the above. It's not, there is some training that is strictly e-learning e-learning.
25:09 That is, in my opinion, it's good for
25:17 in-between stuff, continuous learning, just bringing it back to memory and just making it sink in, checking on what you've learned, gauging yourself on what you've learned or someone else gauging
25:34 your knowledge. But in real well-controlled training, it's all they have to put it and you have to do it all. It's a whole different stretch, right? And the unique side of it, I've been an
25:47 instructor now for going on 15 years, just teaching well-control. And
25:56 it's just like I said, when we're drilling well, everyone's different, every class is different. Who are you going to get next? And how that works. Because these classes are so dynamic. from
26:08 the moment you start, as an instructor, you can't be cold, you can't be, you know, you can't be a professor and you can't just say, well, you need to read this part and continue. You have to
26:20 make this dynamic. You have to make them engage. You have to bring them through. You facilitate the course more than you do teach it. And you are going to go through a lot of ups and downs through
26:32 the course. Stressful situations will put you on the simulators. We will put
26:39 your feet to the fire. You need to feel this out or I need to get this equation now. I want to know what. And really get people because the rig is in a sterile environment. If they can't do it in
26:51 the classroom, how are they going to do it in the rig? And so we put a lot of that trial and immersive learning into that classroom to make that happen. And I think that's what the future of wall
27:02 control training even more. I mean. I picture like a pilot and they're like in this crazy machine and go up and down on like gyroscopics or whatever. Like what's like the most like realistic thing?
27:15 I can take you from your laptop and you being able to adjust to choke and circulate out a kick and do everything that way to full cyber chairs and immersed and just like that pilot and they're having
27:28 to drill, take a kick, work through everything. You know the big difference zone. I know this sounds weird is, a pilot and him going through that training, they really just fly the plane. When
27:41 we look at the driller and we look at that crew and the tool pushers, they work together so much, you really can't just do that single. So when we do simulators for our drillers, they just drill,
27:55 shut in a well. When we look at our supervisors, they circulate out kicks, they hear the gas come to surface, they can feel that. through the atmosphere from that gas roaring, and they have to
28:08 shut it back in. They have to prevent another kick from happening. So, we have a great industry and we have great simulator providers out here that have been working for the last 30 years,
28:20 basically building simulators and perfecting them. And we're coming into a new age of simulations. So, now we're looking at VR and augmented realities And we're starting to see how that ties in
28:34 with AI, because now we can put somebody basically on their rig. And we can give them their well and we can do it now. Where before that would have taken months to build and get everything together,
28:49 we can now put that together now. Yeah, yeah, I mean, cyber chairs. Yeah, we're actually gonna have someone on who does like the VR stuff. Oh, nice. And I've seen it, we've done demos with
28:60 people and stuff like that.
29:02 Just remember, 23 of the population get motion sickness. Oh boy. Yeah. They were less than that. That was our first. You know, we tried VR the very first time. Of course, this has been over a
29:14 decade ago. Yeah, people get sick very quick and it was just a learning experience, but amazing tech and it was an amazing thing. But we have to figure out a little bit. Let me ask you, do you
29:27 do the blast generators in their ears, just that loud environment on those we did not, but they do put the sounds behind it. Even our old simulators. That was a big thing. You turn it up, you
29:41 turn the volume up, you hear those pumps, you hear everything running. Hello there. Yeah. Uh, speaking of, uh, like training courses and stuff, you know, we just had Masielle on who she has
29:52 a history and wire line and she was talking a lot about how she learned, um, from the ground up, basically And she said at one point, they would set up their - like a student's in a way to fail to
30:04 see how they deal with high pressure situations. And you know, you hear the same thing about like air traffic control, pilots, whatever. You know, do you all practice any kind of form of that?
30:13 Yes, biggest thing, if you're gonna burn a rig down, do it in my simulator room, right? And we learn from failure. That's the biggest end of this. So if you want to do something, one of the
30:27 sayings is you get these guys all the time, well hold the case and gauge constant, which is an absolutely wrong thing to do. Problem with it is, oh you don't do that, and do it the right way. No,
30:38 I always looked at it, just do it. Let's see what happens, right? All I have to do is hit a reset button. And once they see the whole rig burn down, once they realize this thing's done, they
30:50 can see, hey, that's not what I'm supposed to do. I can learn from my mistakes. I eat out on a rig that's really hard to do because a lot of times you don't walk away Yeah, and we'd. Basically
31:02 what
31:03 we do is we don't simulate drilling the hole. They start out like just a few minutes of that. That's not what we're trying to do. Well, the real simulation is they're drilling a little bit and
31:18 then they get a problem. But unlike the guy in the airline simulator, he doesn't have a flashing light that tells him, Oh, your hydraulics are low, or another flashing light that says, This
31:31 engine is sputtering. All he's got is gauges and stuff that have been there all along and then he's got to figure out what's wrong pretty quick. And that's what we simulate. We throw them a problem
31:47 and don't say there's no indicators of what the problem is. There's indicators that it could be this could be that could be this could be that he's got to work it out. So I always have this Uh,
31:60 this always comes up whenever we're talking about like, uh, on shore field, whatever, and like kind of the evolution of whatever we're talking about and well control very much fits in these two
32:09 questions. And that's always talking about the transition from those shell revolution. So basically how are things going right before and how are things going today? And then comparing it to
32:20 offshore. So I feel like well control can kind of go into both of those starting with the shell revolution. So when we're, we're doing all these vertical wells for decades and then we started going
32:30 horizontal constantly. What does, what did well control do to like adjust and like what changed maybe in the industry as far as training is concerned or I mean, when you're going horizontal, like
32:44 what's, what is introduced? Is there more tech involved? There's there more machines
32:55 and like what is actually equipment had to evolve a little bit but in well control what that
32:58 in our little part of that world. the kick we talked about came in and it showed itself at a different angle
33:11 because let's say you're horizontal and your gauges are watching, you're watching your gauges up here and you're drilling away and the influx, the gas or whatever starts coming in at the end.
33:24 It's going to have to go all the way until it starts to go up before you realize you have a key. You're blind to it. Right. So if you've got half a mile of lateral out there full of gas, by the
33:39 time you see it, you've got a huge problem.
33:44 So I guess that's. I look at my career and so I was home for me was West Virginia, Southwestern Pennsylvania. So I was Mark Southwest. Yeah, I was Utica. And I didn't start off that way. I
34:01 started off on high pressure, old, or risk any wells. And so I worked for a company called Equitable, which turned into EQT. And we were drilling straight holes, shallow, cold bed methane. The
34:18 deepest we were going was 2, 000 foot, 2, 500. And we were popping holes right and left and we're making good money off of legacy And then the first Marcellus well was drilled. And we had
34:33 basically a 2, 500 foot lateral. And what was incredible with it was, when we open flowed that well and it was flaring, we were flaring 23 million a day. At that point, that one well made more
34:47 than three districts of legacy. So everything changed overnight. Yeah. Yeah. So we had to change with it. We had to learn it, right? And I was lucky because I was always a high pressure guy.
34:59 So it kind of fit in with my angle. I could go in, I could work it, but we were still learning. Yeah, we were still all pretty green. And what we saw was you basically had to react so much
35:14 faster in some ways because we were drilling so much faster. If you looked at a vertical hole before, that was a month long drill. And all of a sudden we were looking at jumping in and we were
35:26 doing this in 21 days, then 15, then 11. And then all of a sudden we're drilling the hole and out the lateral in seven, right? It was just absolutely incredible. So we were doing different
35:39 technology. Everything was new. And low control at that time basically was staying. 1980s,
35:52 Gulf of Mexico, land, vertical hole vertical hole. 10, 000 foot, 10 pound per gallon fluid, not much was changing. And I think it wasn't until we really got into what it's called the well-sharp
36:06 days, the changeover that we start getting. And finally, they recognized horizontal wells. And then that was one of our specialties at well-control schools. We built horizontal wells. We taught
36:19 horizontal before anyone else. Tony Deere was one of the first to come out and really pioneer how do you recognize, how do you react, and made these guys start seeing what they actually saw on the
36:29 well. And that became the big difference. All these simulator companies had to redo their software and make horizontal wells for us. But ultimately it sounds like that all went pretty seamlessly.
36:43 Y'all adapted, y'all are on top of it. The industry as a whole, yeah. Well, we got very lucky. We pulled in some of the very best instructors Um, We didn't just have a curriculum department.
36:57 We built it ourselves, you know. So the guys that not only were teaching it were part of the build process. And these guys were from the field. So you got that experience where a lot of places,
37:12 it became very canned. It was a very, yeah, you'd see, you could go to three different schools and see three different presentations, but they had the same images They had the same, I mean, it
37:24 was just cookie cutter. You know, how do I get my certificate? How do I get out of here? And there was a couple providers who just stepped up and just did it better, so. Yeah. And then that
37:38 brings me to the second question, which is about offshore, comparing, you know, everything we've kind of just talked about the last 30 minutes. What kind of wrench does offshore throw into all
37:48 this, if anything? Ready for the golf to get hot again,
37:54 They do a lot of their own teaching. Really? So that's one big end. They, a lot of the companies teach their own. The other side of this is
38:06 it's getting caught up with technology because offshore today is tech heavy and not everybody has gotten that down yet to mimic it. Not here to teach you how to drill your well. I'm here to teach
38:21 you well control but how does your tech build into the well control? And I know you guys have touched managed pressure drilling and all these different things but those are all the new tech that's
38:32 coming in. So you talked about how vertical versus the shale, it was directional drilling. Well, today what's the difference going to be? It's going to be managed pressure drilling and we'll
38:43 drill wells quicker, faster, go to areas that we've never been before because of these possibilities. And it takes the classroom to get them there These guys are going to have to be trained on -
38:53 what and how to react, how to use the equipment, and the big one, you know, how to work together with it. Well, not to simplify it too much, either you get back to the well control side of sub
39:10 C versus land, you gotta think about it. You've taken your BOP from the rig floor and you put it on the C floor
39:22 Okay, so from there down it's, you can say it's basically the same, you watch the same gauges, you watch the same indicators, but from
39:38 that BOP up, depending on the depth of the water, it can be 5, 000 feet of water.
39:45 That's where, that's the difference. Of course. Anything gets into that, what they call a riser, going from the sea bed to the platform, anything that gets in there that's not supposed to be in
39:60 there is a serious problem. And you don't have a BOP at top to stop it like you do on land. It's BOP is on the rig floor. I mean on the sea bed, sea floor. So that's simplifying it a little bit,
40:19 but that's the difference between land and subsea. Yeah. Yeah, I never, I never really been broken down what the offshore rigs are doing. So obviously they're not using all the fancy pipe above
40:32 the BOP. That's just in the water. So you, I mean, I don't understand what that is. You have a big straw that goes from a victory. That goes down. But inside of that's the same type of drill
40:43 string that you're drilling on land with. Okay. But that's inside the riser. And down into the BOP. So the risers there. We've come a long way with Riser technology, but you have to think, I
40:55 mean, we talk 5, 000 foot, and we're talking about ocean currents. This isn't a straight up and down. There's a lot of give and bend, this is a good. Yeah, that's what I'm picturing. Yeah,
41:05 yeah. I'll save that for a different podcast.
41:10 So something interesting, I kind of thought about what this topic is like, is there maybe like a villain in this industry? Is there someone who's keeping secrets, they have their tech, they're
41:22 not sharing with the rest of the class, their stories, their information, like, is there anything like that? Or is it all pretty open and? No, I don't think, I don't think so. I don't think
41:33 there's a villain like that. I think anybody who knows something that can save a rig, save a life is gonna talk about it. It's gonna tell you. I think the funny end is a lot of times is, as they
41:46 say, well, we have well control school and they have competitors.
41:51 we work together hand-in-hand at IADC conferences all the time. Most of us have worked at one or the other at one point. So, yeah, there is no real big evil entity out here that's not preventing
42:04 the world from knowing, right? And I think that's one of the
42:10 toughest things to do. We may not have been great as an industry to be able to get it out to the public how all this is. But it's also not an easy subject. It's not like I can do an ABC after
42:23 school special on how to drill well. That's what we're doing right now. And that's it. What's funny is they tried it. We tried it with the Marcellus and the Northeast. Every commercial, all
42:35 these radio programs, we had the Marcellus Coalition and we did the Marcellus Minute trying to teach the general public not to be afraid, but to understand. And I think in a lot of areas it worked
42:47 really well. Do we need to do better? Yes.
42:52 Yeah, do we need to work better together? I think we're doing a pretty good job at it.
42:60 Collide and things that we're looking at now, it's only gonna make that stronger. People can come in and ask questions. People are hungry for social media. This isn't the day where guys went away
43:13 for two weeks and they got lucky to get a phone call. Everybody's connected now and we can talk and we can share and we can move stuff forward. We just did a presentation in New Orleans at the
43:25 conference about how we bring over all of those old incidents and putting them into training. Yeah, and that's those companies being honest. This happened. This is what went on so we can learn
43:38 from those mistakes, make this better and move everything forward. Wrapping it up with some questions, you know, wanted to get back to some of the newer tech we were talking about We even
43:49 mentioned VR, stuff like that. Um, but like, like that, that, that the current state we're at right now, like what, going back to the field, like what is actually on site that's really
43:60 helping well control? Like, is there anything that's just actually fully autonomous mistake proof? Like you can't mess it up. Like what are some of the things out there that are really doing the
44:10 job right now? I don't know. I've never heard of one. We, you've got, you've got different brands of things that are out there
44:23 It supposedly will help you with that right tools. Yeah, but I mean, I look at it and I look at the K boss system, right? Uh, a single shot cuts everything and closes it in. I mean, do it.
44:41 It's going to cost you a lot of money, but that's a change. That's a movement forward, right? MPD,
44:50 I think.
44:52 Yeah, we look at
44:55 MPD and we used to tell them. He's talking about managed pressure drilling. There's a whole system they set up. It's a normal rig, but then they bring into the separate system 'cause they're gonna
45:04 drill under pressure.
45:09 They're basically taking a kick the whole while they're drilling but they have a system that's gonna control that. All right, so it's fully automated It's got all kind of bells and whistles,
45:23 but you got a man or a woman sitting there watching it and knowing when to flip this switch and when to flip that switch, it's gonna flip its own switches for a while. And it's, but it's still a
45:38 machine. And you've got to have, there's a human somewhere and
45:44 like back on a rig, let's go back to the alarms. There's flow alarms, there's gazelle arms. And when they start going off and somebody says, Okay, okay, I know what. And they flip it off,
45:58 they take care of the problem, forget to flip it back on. The next time there's a problem, no warning. Well, the alarm didn't go off. Well, no, it did, you flipped it off,
46:10 like humans. You've got this technology, it's there to help. And some of those people claim that you don't have a worry about a thing. Yeah, you do. Right. We also, the communication and
46:26 Starlink and the communication side has really opted for us. It gave us the options now though, that we can have war rooms in company offices that are watching all of those dynamics themselves. So
46:39 not only do you have the guys on the rig, but you also have somebody in a sterile environment be able to kind of keep up with what's going on, right? And a lot of times it's not just about really
46:50 parameters, it's also about issues that may be occurring. Yeah, I mean, y'all started off saying that it's a lot of manpower and it's same, you know, we're still at that point. But just to end
47:00 with the questions here, like what can you actually maybe almost confidently predict that like AI or just any kind of advanced tech will actually, we'll see in a few decades where it is fully
47:12 automated or like
47:14 a super tool or just completely mistake proof, a set it, forget it, being on a site that can help. Is there anything in the works? Anything you can see? I've said this for a while and there have
47:26 been autonomous rigs out there that's already ran. Yeah, drill by wire is not a new thing. The thing with it now is we're gonna have the same crew, but they're just kind of a new task. They may
47:39 not be drilling a hole, but they're repairing the machinery that is. And that may be where we get to it.
47:46 And this is never to take any jobs away. But anytime we can get a guy off that rig floor, we're just a little bit safer, right? The further we can get that back. So if we can figure out how we
47:59 can use, all of this automation to make us just a little bit safer, that's what's gonna matter. So, and then there's gonna be plenty of jobs to fix all that automation, so. Cool. Well, Ryan,
48:12 Dana, thanks for coming on Why don't you all kind of pitch y'all's podcast? Because, you know, everyone comes on and kind of just shares with how they do their part in the industry, but y'all are
48:22 actually, like us, putting out media, helping, and educating. So, what exactly do you all do online, podcast-wise? Oh, you mean the
48:32 on-site with Tony Deere? TD, yeah, on-site with TD. Yeah. It's a, oh, come in. Well, we looked at and said, How do we get learning? to everybody a little bit differently. How can we bring
48:50 the subject matter experts onto their phones? Kind of like, what would you guys have done? And we were taking it from the perspective, let's set down. We have the top people in the industry
49:01 coming in to take these courses. Can we get them for 15, 20 minutes? Can we, yeah, have a discussion that maybe we didn't really wanna have? Yeah, and let's put the people who know it together
49:16 And throw some personality to it, have some fun with it and do. So yeah,
49:23 Tony is the director of our training department and phenomenal when it comes to it. And he makes everybody feel like they're at home. And so we really get some pressing questions. We hit some great
49:38 topics. And we're hoping to have another season coming up here of really great guests. bringin' everything out into the forefront and workin' with you guys with it. Yep, they're up on YouTube.
49:52 You can go to our website, welcomeshowcom and click the little YouTube link. Take your right to 'em. They're kinda long though. The 15 minute thing you said, them guys went like an hour. We're
50:06 hitting an hour. We already had an hour. Like everyone's usein' at these days, that's great. There's some good stuff. We got a couple really good ones And, you know, we
50:19 really wanna see what we can do differently to make this better. And I think that's the one thing of, you know, for well-controlled school and what we do, I think, is it's not gonna be the same
50:32 old, same old. We're gonna change this, yeah. And that's what we work towards. That's why we like working with you guys. You guys see a future that
50:44 can be a lot better, so. Yeah, y'all doing good work.