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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 finally me and you just us and your friends Steve.
0:13 Very good man, Mr. Good Man. Troy. Yeah, man. Troy Tittlemeyer, I'm the host this time. It's it? It's the first, isn't it? Huh? So this is the first, isn't it? First for me to be on the
0:22 other side? Now I've had some people interview me or podcasts with me from a different show, you know? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. First one, for sure, the digital Wildcats, right? Yeah.
0:33 That's the first one in this studio and doing anything there. Yeah, pretty cool In your podcast, Permian Basin Experience. That's how it started, right? 'Cause I was in the Permian Basin and I
0:46 was experiencing things as a young professional. Okay. So I'm like, this is a Permian Basin experience. And of course, skips was the co-host. We had PDOG on the computer. We had our group, man.
0:56 We were it. Yeah. A train on the mixer. And then over time, especially after COVID, and we kind of got into mining and different, subjects and deeper into the process of serpentization stuff
1:09 like that we said, this is just people behind energy PVE podcast gotcha Behind energy. Yeah, I know by the old school name. You know, it's still running that Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah.
1:21 Yeah. Hey, we could turn the mics on anytime. Yeah, just got a five in the time. Cool. Very cool well, and you're in Well, give us a little bit of background. So you've done some work in the
1:32 unconventional space, but right now you're real heavy into conventional oil, I guess, you're, you're drilling wells, you're producing shallow formations, some of the old school. Yeah, the
1:43 problem you had this weekend. Maybe you tell us about your your weekend problems. Yeah, electrical issue doesn't doesn't turn the transfer pump on when the pressure gets right in the tank. And so
1:58 when you have what like 500 barrels a day coming into a tank, it's produced water. Mostly it's just a little dirty carry over. but it's coming in that fast. Doesn't take long to make a mess. Yeah.
2:11 Yeah. Direct burial, man. Direct burial electrical, I don't know, I don't believe it. Takes a whole lot longer to clean it up than it does to make it.
2:20 That's my experience. That's mostly with anything, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so tell
2:29 me where you kind of got started into oil and gas.
2:32 Like how did I get, sorry, got my degrees, right? In undergrad, out of California. And I did that because I met a biology professors. I wanted to be a doctor of osteopathy after surviving a
2:45 really bad motorcycle accident. Okay. I wanted to give it back, you know, like I want to be an MD and heal people or whatever, or at least get them back to 100. 'Cause that's what happened to me.
2:55 And in my pursuit of that, I get a biology lesson. And the teacher starts telling us about the famous spills up in Santa Barbara. right? Offshore California. Yeah. Oil covers the shoreline, the
3:10 pictures of the birds and the people freaking out, you know, which South Padra Island, by the way, has oil on the shoreline right now. I don't know if anybody knows. Just naturally occurring.
3:19 That's what they say. Yeah. It's okay. The ocean burping. And so the, yeah, the, anyway, back to that. So I'm in this biology class and
3:30 I'm like, man, she was going on here. Where's this oil coming from? And I never hesitate in school to ask questions. I was older than most people. I went back to school a little later. So I had
3:41 no
3:44 reservation when it came to that, right? Where some people do. Some people don't ask the question. They just sit back and kind of try to figure out what everybody else is figuring out. Yeah. And
3:53 I was like against the grain on a lot of things. So I'm like, where's the soil coming from? Dr. Barbara Collins, man, God rest her soul. She passed away after I graduated She says, What do you
4:02 mean? It came from the oil tankers, you know, the freaking oil rigs and the pipeline and I went, no, where's oil come from? I don't like, where does it come from? She's like, oh, you need to
4:12 talk to my husband. He's the geologist. So Dr. Larry Collins, who's still alive, shows up on campus one day and I pick his brain about it. And in that conversation, he explains to me that the
4:26 conventional wisdom of how to make oil from carriage
4:31 in through pure biotic sources, the thermodynamics on that are really messed up. Like you don't have to be a crazy PhD to figure it out. There's mathematical equations that came out of Colorado
4:45 School of Mines that explain like, hey, there's a problem here. And that ended up being a buddy of his. So that's why he was like over the top about it, right? And he goes, just pay attention
4:55 to that, you know? And then he tells me, geologists never work a day in their life either, right? And that sounded good. I'm like, that's.
5:04 I go MD route or, you know, what's this geology thing all about and, and, and this pursuit of like, where does, where does oil come from? Such a simple question, but it just, uh, it lit a
5:13 fire, you know, and, and, uh, and so I switched, uh, switch majors and pursued geology and got my undergrad and on my last semester, I flew to Midland. It was a friend of mine who helped, uh,
5:26 meet through the recovery lives in Midland. And he says, you got to come out here for oil and gas and when Midland's going crazy, this is 2014. Okay. Yeah. What, uh, I got a backstory there
5:37 that we don't need to go into, but I went Midland Texas. I got to check it out. So I googled it, right? I'm like, Oh, UTPB, there's university there. I need to get a master's. I was pursuing
5:46 California schools because that's just where I was and I knew I wanted to do oil and gas, but I didn't even know Midland at the time of graduating. I barely started knowing that Midland Texas was
5:56 the epicenter of oil and gas. Right. So now I'm flying out there I'm staying with a friend.
6:04 And I go to the West Texas geologic symposium, right, it's every year. And I get to meet the professors there, I get to meet professionals and Curtis Helmsman with Trey Resources, which was ran
6:16 by Trey David Thomas, who came out of Concho,
6:22 he started that and we were pursuing unconventional, they had stuff on the carbonate platform in the Permian, they had stuff up in Oklahoma, and they needed a geotech And I was like, I'm here for
6:33 whatever that is. I love it. Right? I go, I mean - It just started happening. Yeah. Yeah. And just pursued it like crazy. He got my degree, graduated, and I said, Look, I need just a month
6:44 or two tops. I know if I go and live there, I'll get a job. 'Cause I had that lead, right? So I piggybacked off that lead and he got a bunch of more and met, went every building in downtown.
6:55 Yeah. And it was hot. You know, June, or no, this was like May, it was right when I was graduating So like yeah, April May Midland, Texas in a suit, you know, all wrinkly. I remember one
7:05 old man, he was a land man. He was in a badass office and the old timer, dressed to the nines. Yeah. And after meeting me, he's like, Man, I got this guy you need to go talk to. And he goes,
7:16 You know what, I gotta tell you, you need to iron your shirts.
7:21 And he literally went to a closet and handed me shirts from his closet, like brand new, yeah. The cuffling style shirts too, like legit And your college kids like, Man, I can't afford no
7:32 cuffling. How do you even do this, man? You need a rope or something. Yeah. Yeah, very cool. Well, that explains a whole lot, I guess that I didn't know about you. So I've gotta tell our
7:44 audience about this last weekend where, well, maybe it's been a week ago. So we had this get together and Troy's there. Reid Palooza. Reid Palooza. And there's this other guy, Mike Kilmer, is
7:58 sitting there talking to me a little bit. And Mike's talking about like this process of like what we're doing to water and where something somewhere other and Troy kind of like joins the group. And
8:08 Troy hadn't been there for 10 seconds. This is what I like about Troy. Troy, I've been there for 10 seconds. And Mike says, yeah, we were, we were ionizing the water because we had a calcite
8:18 problem. And Troy just smiles real big and his eyes light up and he goes, Oh, and hydrides. And here I am like, my brain lag is like 30 seconds or a minute behind. And I'm still catching up on
8:29 like, Hey, we're ionizing water. And this dude's already figured out like all the chemistry of what he's doing down whole. And that's why I like hanging out with you because every time we get
8:40 together, I get to learn a little bit more. And so hearing your background be so heavy in, you know, biology and in chemistry and whatnot, it, you know,
8:52 we started hanging out because I wanted to learn more about geology oil and where it comes from being a better oilman. That's right. Right. Um, and I've like two years down this road, maybe two,
9:04 three years, maybe now down this road of like geology. And I'm starting to jump off into this rabbit hole of like chemistry. I need to understand that the positive and negative ionic charges, I
9:17 need to understand the conversion into the limited limestone. And I need to understand the conversion of the carriage in. And so like now I'm way down this rabbit hole and just hanging out last week,
9:28 man. And that's, that's correct, right? He's going to anhydrites. No, Antigorite. Antigorite. See, I got so much to learn.
9:36 It didn't take you 10 seconds and you clicked on and you knew right where we were in the story and what he was trying to do. And that was wild. That was wild. Been paying attention to that story
9:45 for a while. Have you now? Yeah. Yeah. Hydrogen is it, man. Hydrogen is the future. And it's not just the, the power we can get from it, which I believe is legit future power will come from
9:57 just hydrogen But the. chemical reactions of hydrogen, hydrogen in nature, across the board, man, is it, like me, we need to better understand it in medicine, we need to better understand it
10:09 in everything. Everything we do, hydrogen is important. Interesting. So the power's already in the hydrogen, we've got to unlock it. You're talking about us like making hydrogen so we can move
10:19 energy from one spot to another.
10:24 I think hydrogen can create legit energy through the exothermic reaction of a hydrogen fuel cell. And you do that in the right environment with enough hydrogen source naturally. So you're not having
10:36 to use electrolysis or some heavy op-ex to make it hydrogen, the byproduct is water of the energy, you're like what? So you're making electricity, you store it into batteries, right? So you got
10:50 to go down the rabbit hole of how much better is our battery technology really going to get with this but hydrogen is super, super efficient and incredibly clean. incredibly clean by product. You
11:01 make water. Yeah. Whoa. That's cool.
11:06 That's cool. I like it. Because we need more water. Yeah. Yeah.
11:11 We need more whiskey. Get down that rabbit hole about the water in South Texas right now.
11:18 So you're currently drilling and maintaining and reworking and just knee deep in some conventional fields in South Texas.
11:34 You still have your own operating company. I know you're doing that for a while. Yep. Okay. Yep. Still got my glory hole. Yeah. Of old summer set. Yep. And then did a stint up on the central
11:43 basin platform. And that's turning into a major science project really. It goes into hydrogen. Okay. What's going on there? But it didn't work out economically. You know, as far as, you know,
11:53 let's fix this well and see if we can get back to 10 barrels a day, 12 barrels a day. Yeah. I did three. and then just kind of hiled out at three and you got so much corrosion problems
12:04 operationally when you're when you're at that depleted and kind of long in the tube like this was totally left for dead stuff yeah way way left for dead so I took you know major risk going into that
12:16 but yeah we what what ended up happening like most things is you just kind of figure out what wasn't there obviously yeah and then kind of reflect back right and and try to learn from that and then
12:30 convert it into what converted into some kind of value if you can if you can't then it's your responsibility to plug and abandon that thing properly right that's what every operator needs to hold like
12:41 in honor yeah because they get they definitely don't do it economically right you don't pursue getting a bunch of wells knowing that you're gonna have this plugging liability all over the place and
12:51 all this stuff like that that hurts economics and really hurts the model so. I learned that, learned it fast, especially in that second project, was, wow, this plugin liability is a deal killer.
13:03 Yeah. So, yeah, so doing that, in prospect generation, right? So, yeah, I do consulting out on operations, and then I have my own operating company that I keep up with, and we're pursuing
13:19 different things, and then put prospects together from the mining industry. Like for copper, gold, I got a graphite thing that's really looking cool, 'cause graphite's not going into battery
13:27 technology. Okay, cool. Lithium brines. Yeah. Yeah, that's why I was here in Houston. Always good to spend a day in Houston, right? Yeah. Yeah, you don't talk about making some water,
13:37 you'll sweat it out out here.
13:40 Yeah. Cool. So looking at brine technology out here. Yeah, looking at, well, we're talking to people who want to fund the risk, right? Gotcha. They got a lot more money than I do, and they
13:53 got the ability to calculate risk, money to, to try for it. So, you know, have those meetings and kind of run down some of those unanswered questions that, you know, there's an answer to it.
14:05 And then it just starts to become a fine line in those conversations and kind of to the point of, are you going to do this or not, is at some point we're projecting so many things, right, for this
14:16 to work from an economic modeling, like at some point, like that's the risk and you need to just identify that and are you good with with it or not. Yeah. So we were doing that this morning.
14:26 Gotcha. Gotcha. No, we've definitely gotten to a place, particularly in oil and gas where in the last 20 years, we've developed a set of repeatable results, right? Dependable. And so it's no
14:40 longer like, are we drilling an oil well? Are we gonna get oil? Are we gonna get gas? We know that we're gonna get some returns We know that it's gonna be at least marginally economic, is is it
14:53 economic enough? us, right? We've got these IRRs that we need to hit. I'm not going to touch it if it's not 25 IRR, right? So we've got like this repeatability of it
15:05 where like, you know, 30, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, it was always the risk in every well. We're always going to go drill this next well, hope that we hit, hope that we find a field or hope
15:17 that we make it economic if we do. And I had an old timer.
15:22 Bob Minor drilled a bunch of wells around me. And I was talking to him here in the last year. And he told me, he said, you know, there's three kinds of wells, read, there's dry holes.
15:35 Don't really happen that often, he said, I don't feel like dry holes happen that often to me. You know, there's barn burners, which often, sadly, don't happen that often to me. He said, then
15:45 there's bleaters. There's those wells that just make enough oil that you set pipe and you shoot And you try like the Dickens to make your money back for the next 30 years. That's right. And you end
15:58 up pissed off and plugging it. Yeah. And you move on.
16:04 Yeah. But if you're good at finding it, you know, you should be able to start targeting your way into something that's either gonna be thousand barrels a day or it's not. Yeah. You know, is it
16:15 there or it's not move on? Like while cadding has got its place. And I think it's coming back And I think I definitely have some prospects that I could present from a technical standpoint on why 20
16:29 million, 30 million barrels could be there. And yeah, there's not much data outside of that. It's some creative thinking. But there's a lot of details and a lot of stuff that goes into that
16:40 thought and everyone sits around and says, Is it worth the risk, you know? Yeah, that's a true wildcat. And I think, I think there's definitely that. There's definitely still room for that pure
16:50 out on the frontier of something that. has enough anomaly in it with gravity, magnetics and regional stuff that's not expensive to get, you can match it and say, yeah, it's worth it. If that
17:06 well comes in it, if the analog is making 10 million in the first five years of production, I think that's gonna work. Let's go try it. Yeah, let's go set pipe and frickin' perv, man. Yeah.
17:20 But there's the, I think the industry right now, there's two things going on. You got, it's, I think a lot of people expect it to be guaranteed returns because the unconventional horizontal play,
17:31 right, is so repeatable in a sense, and they got the cost down, and they're drilling them faster, and you're gonna get 3 on your money, or 5, you know, it's not gonna be
17:42 25, maybe some of them might. Yeah, for the most part, I think everyone's happy if they get three to five out of that And so it's just this expectation of like a guarantee almost. You know, and
17:54 then there's the, no, this is, you're gonna be like on the top of this rig covered in oil or you're gonna walk away and say it didn't work, you know, and you get nothing. And you burn everything
18:05 you just put into it. Yeah. You get a little smarter. Maybe in a good way, maybe not. If you're capable, turn some wrenches and make it happen, you know, be a part of it. Yeah. Well, and I
18:17 think there's a group of folks going back to kind of that old school way and thought too And more in like, you know, there was a time we had company men, right? They work for the company, they
18:29 sit out there, they make a bunch of your calls on location, right? And with the shale boom, we've moved towards consultants. And consultants rarely take the risk and make a call on anything.
18:45 They've got a set of SOPs they follow. They've got an engineer to call when something doesn't match the SOPs. We no longer have guys in the field
18:53 20, 30, 40 years of experience making the decision there in real time. Right, so like that's a big change from what we had as company man to what we have as consultants today. Wow, I love that.
19:05 Okay, so with that same like thought process, when we go into our prospects and drilling a bunch of these wells,
19:15 in the day of that company man, we had he had expertise because he had been in this field and his tool pusher had expertise because he had drilled in the area and his geologist had expertise. He
19:26 said, I don't know where that fault is, but I think it's right here. He had a feeling 'cause he had mapped out stuff for 40 years and he's like, I think it's right here. Exactly, but he can't
19:37 back it up with all the data that we have these days that we're so hard on for, right? Sure. So I think there's a resurgence of a number of guys saying, hey, instead of raising300 million and
19:51 spend in private equity money to go do this. My expertise is worth 50 grand, and your expertise is worth 50 grand. Instead of you having to put 50 grand in this well, why don't you come do your
20:02 job really well, and I'll do my job really well, and we'll get together and we'll go drill this well. And you know, that's what it was like at one point in time. And we're kind of getting,
20:14 I hope, you know? I think we're kind of getting back to that with a small number of people. We lost that focus for 15 or 20 years. And now it was so easy to get or what? No, it was the loss of
20:23 focus there, 'cause this sounds way cooler than just using somebody else's money. Yeah, well, everybody wanted the big money, right? Yeah. The big money was in the show Wells. We were going as
20:34 fast as we can. There were these big new discoveries. There was all this fear of missing out. You know, we were trying to knock all this stuff out and get a home run and prove up a little bit of
20:44 acreage and sell it off to whoever and be Cadillacing from then on. Wow. And then we lost our risk tolerance. and a lot of, so, you know, for the folks that don't know, my background is a lot
20:58 in downhill tools, artificial lift. And so I spend a lot of time in the field, I spend a lot of time in engineers' offices as well. And a lot of engineers will not try something new. They won't
21:15 stick their neck out, they just, they just need to do their job well enough, they're not gonna lose it for very few engineers And there are a couple out there that I know that I get named, but
21:25 very few engineers are like, let's try something, let's make this better. The wrist tolerance from the top all the way down, it's just largely disappeared in oil, I guess.
21:40 So, I don't know what you do with that. Maybe you get a bunch of old boys together to go. That's right. Put an idea and shoot some shit and drink some whiskey Hell yeah, hell yeah. That's right.
21:54 Hey, when I go out to work, thank God. I got people that I know I can. My life is protected as much as possible. They have my back and we can conquer anything. We're not afraid of the danger,
22:07 right? Because we we have that synergy. We have that respect and that doesn't happen everywhere. You know, like you got all these teams that are hodge pods together. No one's looking for each
22:17 other's backs and all that stuff. So it's a team in history and and and being involved into something that you're truly investing in. That's so huge. That's so much power. Yeah. And in making it
22:29 successful or not, how many times do you think a bad cement job has caused the failure of freaking wells in the Permian Basin? Oh, a ton of them right now. Yeah. It's and it's just getting worse.
22:40 Yeah. It's like, geez, you know, how are we how are we not united a little bit stronger in the oil and gas industry to limit those mistakes and limit that and have a place where, yeah, these are
22:51 the good old boys that are looking for those home runs. These are the guys you can trust. They'll have your back. They have the money to do it. They have your back. What's the idea? Yeah. You
22:60 know, pitch me the idea and if it's good enough, hell yeah, I got the money to go do that. Yeah. I think those times are coming back, man. What do you think? Yeah, I think they are. I hope
23:10 they are. 'Cause that's the kind of oil and gas I like. That's what, you know, that's what I like to do, is to go try something, make a decision, see how it works, put my hands on it and make
23:22 it happen. And,
23:25 I mean, I can run an Excel spreadsheet for hours and hours and hours. But until we get out there and turn that pump on, you know, I don't know if it's 35 burls a day or 37 burls a day. And in
23:36 some of this stuff, that. 2 burls a day, makes a difference, you know? As you found out, with your wells in West Texas, you know, it's being a good, efficient operator, can make a big
23:48 difference on some of these marginal wells.
23:52 So we've got a lot of work to do on that side. I think we've lost a lot of the knowledge as well. Yeah.
24:01 I had to put a flare on one of my wells and it started venting enough gas that it was like, Look, we need to do something with this gas. What was that number if you don't mind me asking? About 12
24:13 MCF a day. I was like, We really need to do something with this gas You're not whistling. Yeah, like we're starting to get kind of out of the look the other way for a day or two and like, we need
24:23 to put a flare on this, right? Yeah. But being that, you know, I'm not deep pockets and I don't have a bunch of investors or anything like that. So I called one of the local guys and he's like,
24:35 Yeah, I got a four inch flare stack, you know, that I'll sell you for, I think it was1, 000. He had as soon as you're honest. I just come out and put it up. And they were like, Well, how are
24:43 we gonna light this thing? You know, it's like, well, we can do the old mall top cocktail and throw it up there and let it rain. Um, there's an old pumper in the area and, uh, I thought, you
24:54 know, I should call this guy. So I called him and he said, you know what I like to do is to take an old electric finch charger and take two wires and put them up there, just real close together
25:06 and put that finch charger down on the bottom and it'll sit there and it'll arc every couple seconds And he's like, I, you know, that way you don't have to worry if it goes out. It's going to
25:15 start again. I was like, what a simple cheat cost me like 60 bucks. You know where I could have went and spent 30 or40, 000 on one of these control units and skater monitor everything and this
25:29 little just electric finch chargers out there keeping that flare lit, you know, 24 hours a day and we're losing a bunch of that Those guys are retiring, they're dying, we're forgetting how to be
25:41 low cost prudent operators.
25:47 I don't know how much production in America comes from that.
25:53 Roughly half, I think. Half of America's output is from MPa. Yeah.
25:60 Wow. So I think when the shell boom started we were at, I need to go look at these numbers. That's something I should know. When the shell boom started we were a little over 6 million barrels a
26:07 day, production. We've touched maybe 14 million barrels a day, 13 in some change
26:15 Even with the little production decline, you know, we've still got some vertical rigs running. We're still out there putting some of those wells back online or re-perfing a different zone. So I
26:26 would be very confident saying it's 5 million barrels plus and probably 6 million barrels plus, which means if people don't realize half of our oil and gas still comes from mom and pops and
26:38 conventional production. And
26:42 that's a lot.
26:50 Mm-hmm. Especially if the young professionals can't keep up and that climb goes the opposite way just as fast and then all of a sudden the mom paws are worth their weight in gold. Yeah. Well, I
26:58 think we're hitting that decline right now, aren't we? Yeah, I guess you can argue that. I've heard that. You know, not necessarily so much that we've peaked and we can't make more gas out of
27:10 these shell plates or oil out of these shell plates.
27:13 But that, you know, Ray Count's dropping right now. Frank fleets are dropping right now because of where oil price is. Yeah.
27:23 And case fan-off, diamond bag, big news. It's funny 'cause I had seen it two or three times on like LinkedIn and then my dad is always a day late and a dollar short, he'll send me these articles.
27:34 Like two or three days after they come out and I'm like, I've already read this like four dives but thank you for sending it to dad. And I didn't even read the article. It said oil, we've hit peak
27:44 oil. And I was like, they're gonna quote Diamondback. They're gonna quote Casey, you know, like it's, I knew where it was going. So, but anyways, yeah, I don't think he's wrong in that, you
27:57 know, we've lost a bunch of that momentum
28:01 in that way and consolidated a lot of stuff. So, which is why I think conventional focus will be big going forward But you know, it's interesting too, in that
28:14 we knew, like the Eagleford, right? We knew that the Eagleford was there 30, 40, 50 years ago.
28:23 But it wasn't until we went and started drilling it in hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling that we got this big boom in it, right? So, it makes you wonder, you know, we're still going
28:37 to produce all these conventions.
28:40 But what about like the Greta formation in South Texas? I mean, it sounds like just a little bit. It's a, it's a free O formation. Free O's. It's not real thick,
28:50 it's pretty tight sand. It had great eyepiece, okay? So there's a number of guys in South Texas right now. It's been produced conventionally for 60, 70 years. Some of these wells have done great,
29:04 cumed a million, million and a half barrels. Wow. It's 6, 000 feet, right? Nice But now what these guys are doing is they're going in, and they're drilling horizontally through it, and they're
29:14 trying to hit these tops, not getting to any of the water, and put a little frack on it, or set some sliding sleeves. And so it's a.
29:25 What's happening in the horizontal production? It's doing great. It's coming in with big IPs. It's still tailing off pretty quick, 'cause it's tight, but they're getting their money back in then
29:34 some. What's the formation bound by? You said it's a tight sandwich. What's the cap?
29:40 underneath it. Yep. It's water drive. I know that. So, you know, you might come in, if you drill it well, you might come in at 15, 1600 barrels a day for a one mile lateral. And within two
29:53 years, you're looking at 40, 50 barrels a day of oil, but move in like 3, 000 and 4, 000 barrels of water. Gold. So big water drive. And you inject back into the same formation, you know,
30:05 and just keep kind of washing that rock. Keep the water drive going. Yeah. Wow. So it's the IPs up to 1,
30:12 500 barrels of oil. Yeah. Wow. And it's a sand. It's a sand. It's a tight sand. 10 to 15 feet thick, what'd you say? Yeah, probably. It's called the Greta. Greta. Then I don't know where
30:24 or why, but somewhere in my phone, one day I typed Greta. And every time I typedgreat now,
30:33 it thinks you're saying Greta. It thinks I'm saying Greta. And it like.
30:40 It's almost the new great, man. That's what, you know, I've just been rolling with it. Yeah, I like that. Greta is the new great. Grace never good enough, right? That's right. So now it's
30:46 Greta. Yeah, so, but I guess the whole like
30:53 tangent I'm going on there is,
30:58 just poking a bunch of straight holes. Maybe that's coming to an end in 10 or 15 years. I mean, we've still got to test pilots, but if we can get more formation contact with these laterals, right?
31:14 And we started that in the 80s when a Cladie kicked off kind of all that Austin chalk horizontal drilling. Is that what happened in Piersall? Yeah. Okay. That big Piersall boom and it ran all the
31:26 way up into college station in that area and they were, they were producing the chalk with all these horizontals. And of course they were doing open holes then, and what's funny is now are taking
31:34 the same acreage. We'll go back and run a case toll and a plug and perf and stimulate that Austin chalk that they just had open holes in And making killer wells out of us. Yeah, the Austin Chalk
31:46 will definitely do good when you stimulate it. Yep I heard anyway. Yeah You're nothing better than
31:55 conventional oil Love it. There's not you got to find it. You got to find where it's got the natural water drive It's got the good enough porosity and permeability. Yeah, and it just keeps
32:08 bringing masses of amounts of frickin oil Yeah, you make that well and that's better than frickin all of them the risk of going horizontal and and making it too up and down losing a tool in the hole
32:22 I Don't know. It's just a lot of risk and I the concept is certainly awesome and the engineering is incredible You know the ability to do that It's freaking awesome, but yeah I don't know, man. I
32:35 think targeting, getting a lot more specific on what makes the best part of the reservoir really work. I think there's still plenty of places to go with that kind of concept and drill new and get
32:50 that true, just money making vertical well. Yeah. You know, 7, 000 foot or less. Do you think any of that technology has changed while we've been here focusing on all of this,
33:04 all these laterals everywhere and all the show boom and everything, do you think some of that technology has changed in a way that's going to make us better at conventional is when we put our focus
33:14 back on it? Like the like wire lines, geophysics. Yeah, maybe our completions, maybe our geophysics for identifying it or different forms of like seismic. You mentioned something about magnetics
33:30 earlier, which I'm not real familiar with. Um, is there a bunch of technology that's kind of come around that we didn't use in the 80s and the 90s that we could now come in and apply and like,
33:41 really kick the butt out of this? I think so. I think you can definitely argue a really solid argument for, for 3D, you know, what they're doing with 3D and how they're visualizing the fracture
33:51 networks and that stuff and that's incredible what they can do with, with AI, you know, the human eye could not sit there and go through a 3D cube and keep track of the chaos but they slap AI on
34:05 this thing and it just does it while you sleep? Does it better than you do? Because, you know, as long as you have it trained on something that's real, otherwise you'd see whatever you want to
34:13 see, you know, but if you're tying it to outcrop and doing really good geologic understanding and making sure that all the kinematics of how it's fracturing with the main faults, being the main
34:25 driver of how those natural fractures work and why they're going in the direction they're going, you should be able to that out, you know, if you should make sense, you should be able to get back
34:36 to that point. And you do good geologic evaluation like that.
34:41 Absolutely. I think the crazy thing about how good that's going to be is probably going to tell you how actually narrow the reality of this reservoir is. It's not just all over the place, not strip
34:53 mine in this thing. Yeah, to really make it work. Yeah. So yeah, I think there's some stuff that definitely make us a lot better. I mean, some of the wire line logging like that NMR stuff that
35:04 they do. That's some pretty amazing technology. They got these neutron case hole neutron logs that are doing some really cool behind pipe stuff. Yeah. That NMR that's, that's looking at like free
35:18 bound oil. I'm going to get me lying, dude. It's nuclear magnetic resonance that is something's happening with the way it goes into the pour and it creates a signal and then it gets a second
35:32 reading and depending on what like the shift is and T1 T2 distribution, like that's the curve you get back, right? Is it T1 T2? It's telling you that it's oil, water, gas, like what? Yeah.
35:44 What's going on there? I think Cassiana was showing me some of those and free-bound oils, that's an oxymoron. It's either freer, it's bound, right?
35:53 So yeah, but he was telling me like this percentage of the oil that's there is movable. I think he was saying It can tell you like not just, you know, the saturation of the oil, but how much of
36:06 it? Recoverable. Is like movable through the rock. That's pretty amazing. That is cool. Yep, so yeah, and then some of the, I mean, it just depends on, I guess, your exploration model and
36:18 what you're trying to do with where you're going, but there are so many amazing fields, man, that we can do a better job at understanding, like all that stuff that happened in Luelling those huge
36:28 faults in the 20s and 30s. Yeah, he millions. barrels of oil just out of like 2, 400 feet. Yeah, come on. And how much is left? Yeah, still kicking. Still kicking with a lot of those wells.
36:42 That always amazes me with like, how cruddy of a job we did and how much we made with the little technology or the little knowledge that we had on a lot of that stuff and to think like, we messed a
36:56 lot of it up too, right? Like we swelled a lot of clays, pumped too much fresh water on 'em, we went out and we overshot a bunch of these wells so we brought a bunch of water in from below 'em but
37:08 even like is dumb as we were. In a good reservoir, you're still good. You're still making a lot of oil. That's what we gotta find.
37:19 We need to find a good reservoir. That's it, it hides our mistakes, man. Starts it into the rocks and that's right Any good rocks. That's it, man. That's right. Yup.
37:33 I was looking at this book earlier, 'cause it's Nevada oil fields, which I know the railroad valley story has to be in here. Do you bring that one with you? No, no, this was on the shelf, man.
37:42 I don't know, Joe. Yup. I don't know if you guys are renting these things out, but
37:48 you're gonna take it with you. You've done a little bit of work in Nevada? Just from an analog perspective on this, what I'm talking about, this railroad valley, it's happening in like the '50s,
37:60 it was the hottest oil on record, came out like 120 degrees C or something like that. No joke. Yeah, super hot, no decline, and the two wells did millions of barrels, 20 million, something
38:13 like that. They just killed it. And they couldn't replicate it? Nah, they couldn't quite figure out what was going on with the grant range. That's interesting, at 120 C,
38:26 are you not like, Are you
38:30 not hitting? like a thermal maturity, like where you're over mature and you're starting to turn into gas, right? Wouldn't you be close to kind of
38:41 closer to that point? A dolomite, man. Hydrothermal dolomite, I think the argument there is that it's not, you can't kind of, you can't use that idea. This stuff came in really hot. This is a
38:55 geologic process that was really hot. It has the brines, the carriage and everything that's involved in that and it creates a massive, great conventional reservoir. And it's only in the dolomite,
39:06 which dolomite is
39:08 your oxygen sink. So it's a super reduced rock and you gotta have reduced environment so your oil doesn't get all oxidized. All right, pause for me for a second. Dolomite is the oxygen sink. Yeah.
39:21 All right, so the
39:25 dolomite, the rock, is pulling oxygen out of the hydrocarbons, pulling the oxygen out of the carriage in, out of the environment, whatever it is. fire when it was when it was laid down, when it
39:35 was becoming a rock, when it was becoming a rock, dolotimization, dolotimization is happening. Okay. And it's going from a carbonate calcium, one calcium ion, CA, yeah, with a carbon and
39:47 three oxygens. Okay. So CA CO3 is like a limestone is your limestone. Okay. And when that limestone gets hydrothermally altered, okay, it turns into a dolomite, which is
39:59 MGCA CO3, but it's all taken twice. So it's two times the oxygen sink. Okay. And it's got this magnesium in it. So interesting metal that you, I mean, it's an interesting element you see in all
40:13 kinds of other geologic processes, magnesium is something going on there. Do the geologic rock record. And there's a ton of it, you got the Alps, right, the Dolomite Alps. So in Europe, you
40:25 got everything in the Permian, how much Dolomization has happened there, Guar. you know, Dolomite makes the best fricking reservoirs. And you find it fractured.
40:37 See it, man, lights out. It's oil, baby. Yeah. It's real right into the fricking heart of that fracture swarm and, you know, you got to stimulate it somehow. I would think, you know, you
40:47 want to go in and maybe you get lucky enough where you hit enough to fractures and you just open hole like they did in the Edwards, right? They drilled at the top of the Georgetown and then they set
40:56 pipe and then they just open hold it to the fricking 15, 20 feet Yeah. If the dolomite was there, you're fricking in it. If it's not, you're not in it. Yeah. So that's it. That's fricking
41:08 dolomite is a big deal. During this conversion process from limestone to dolomite, are we creating permeability in that conversion? So like we have saltwater moving in, we have brines moving in.
41:22 They're gonna carry the magnesium to us, right? And it's gonna hit this limestone And if we have enough heat.
41:32 and we have enough magnesium in this brine, there's gonna be a chemical reaction. Am I understanding that right now? Yeah, sure. And that chemical reaction is what turns it into dolomite. Yeah.
41:40 Okay, so when we have that chemical reaction, 'cause we're taking - It's a precipitate. Sorry to interrupt you, but something to think about in this process is the dolomite problem. Is it a
41:51 precipitate or is it a replacement? Oh.
41:56 Oh. Okay So that's kind of weird to think about, 'cause if you're fracturing and you've got these hot brines coming in, is the dolomization a mineralization
42:10 event? Yeah. And that the wall where the carbonate turns to dolomite on necessarily a fracture, just literally a rock change, is actually a healed fracture. And all this dolomite is actually
42:25 precipitating in that void space. in a reservoir that you think is this age, that you think is this thing, but in reality, the event that took place could have happened a million years ago. Huh.
42:37 You know what I mean? Yeah. Is it a precipitate or is it actually replacing calcium carbonate and squeezing magnesium in there and flushing whatever's in place of that out into, I don't know, I
42:52 think I'd go with the original thought. Maybe that the fractures are opening up that big of a, have you ever seen a hydrothermal dolomite drawing like a cross-section of one? They're weird,
43:03 they're always growing around fractures. All of a sudden the dolomite just comes in and the cartoon starts going wild. You're dolomizing and you got oil and gas and all this stuff happening.
43:18 That's an interesting thought experiment on how you'd even figure that out. I bet you can age date it. I wonder if you can age date the carbon, like if you're going horizontal, right? and you're
43:27 in carbonate and bang, you get your dolomite and you're in your zone. I wonder what would happen if you actually aged it? Between. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so how does that dolomite, I'm gonna
43:39 back up here 'cause I'm a simple man. How does
43:46 that dolomite play into the conversion of carraging into hydrocarbons? Are these like separate events and then dolomite is just like a better reservoir rock? Or is that all? I think - Probably
43:57 taking place at the same time. Yeah, I think so. I think the
44:02 thing carraging needs to make oil that no one debates is hydrogen. Okay, if you hydrogenate carraging, you make oil. That's not a debate. Where the carraging comes from is where people start
44:15 getting real debate-y. I gotcha. Oh, this is type one, type two, marine organic. Yeah. Okay. This is an old piece of wood. Can't you tell? No, I can't. I can't tell that And I don't think
44:27 it is. But anyway, the way to make it into liquid hydrocarbons, alkanes, and hydrocarbon chains,
44:34 you have to hydrogenate it. So what's the easiest way to hydrogenate an environment? One, pummel it with hydrogen, right? If you have a natural process, like sopentazation is, it's a massive
44:44 hydrogen release event. So it's your hydrogen source. So you can get a hydrogen source that way, andor,
44:53 you strip the oxygen out of the system I've just put that together, so you call it an oxygen sink. So it's taking the oxygen over here to the dolomite. Where's the hydrogen? It's leaving the
45:03 hydrogen available to take this carriage in. If carriage in's around, it's gonna react. It's gonna react. Caraging is super negative. Hydrogen's super positive. All right. All right. You
45:14 agitate that water molecule, which gives you plenty of hydrogen to play with. Yeah. It's gonna be a place for that oxygen to go. Now all of a sudden, that brine is just working for you, not
45:23 against you. So we're making dolomite, and we're making hydrocarbonate. You said it. I didn't say it. I was still thinking about it. We got to figure out how to do this on demand.
45:36 It's possible. That's cool. I like it. But we have to have the carriage in place. Yeah, carriage in is a key component, man. Sure, some people express that as total organic content, TOC, and
45:49 a reservoir. Yeah, our total organic carbon. Carbon. Okay, yep, yep, that's right But the reality is you got a soluble part of the carogen, and you have a huge part of it, which is insoluble.
46:01 Okay. And to this point in my research and understanding of it, no one has gotten to a lab and put a bunch of carogen on the table, and then figured out how to pack a bunch of hydrogen into that
46:14 environment and force a reaction with the carogen and see what happens. Does the insoluble part actually become soluble? of if you figure that out now.
46:34 your high TOC rocks are truly a self-sourcing environment. Hydrogenate that environment, make oil. 'Cause right now the theory is that we've made oil somewhere and it's migrated and it's stored
46:47 somewhere else. Which sometimes there's a seal and there's some migration and that might be true. Right, you know, there's reservoirs there, that might be true Yes, but a lot of this stuff,
46:57 it's made. A lot of the stuff I'm looking for is made in that particular strata or that particular rock in that particular environment, that particular can you if. And that of all, makeup,
47:03 chemical temperature, pressure try
47:13 to figure out how to backtrack your way to what was it before and what was the brine that came in and what's the brine as it depletes and what's changing, You've got to be able to figure that you got
47:24 to be able to start mass balancing that stuff. You need some serious chemistry and that's that's what we do. That's that's in that's Magna Kim. Yeah, Magna Kim research magma Kim magma
47:36 Kim magma from the earth chemistry. All right. Chemistry drives physics. And so y'all are thinking this is like a like a five year process like a 50, 000 year process like a 5 million year process
47:50 like what's to see the difference in this reservoir change. I mean, do we take a water sample once a year and an oil sample once a year and be able to track it? Or is this like something that's
48:01 going to take?
48:04 I don't really know yet to see if there's any kind of difference down there. You're playing with entropy. You're playing with something that's not going to be repeatable environments, right? If
48:15 you're close to a source of active hydrogenation, for For example, what we pursue is for - conventional theory and where to go for really good oil deposits. We're looking for active geologic
48:28 environments, right? And specifically the process of serpentization. That's our exploration model. Yeah, let's explain that real quick. Folks that don't know, serpentization is mud or brine
48:41 coming up from the Earth's core, more or less. Superheated, all right, I'm gonna get this wrong. You just laugh. Sorry. Superheated. I love it And like making its way through any natural fault
48:53 or fracture that it can and entering a new reservoir. Yeah. Yeah. You can sorta. Yep. All right, clean me up on that.
49:02 The mantle of the Earth, 99 plus volume of our planet, right? Yeah. That's before we see crust, before we see it with the geophysical sound waves, before we ever drill into it, before you see
49:15 crust is the mantle and where the mantle meets the crust, There's also a transition into the hydrosphere. So water's a big component of what's going to water there. At the mojo. At the mojo. Yes,
49:28 sir, there's water there. There's water there. Yeah, when you have water in super critical state, that's a big concept that Magna came really, honed in on and helped develop was this idea that
49:38 water is incredibly durable. And it could be ice sitting at the top of the planet, the highest atmosphere possible, coldest environments And it could be incredibly, incredibly hot as non-ionic.
49:54 It's like a vapor, but there's water and it's down there. So when water interacts with the mantle, specifically perititides, which is what the mantle is mostly made out of, which is like olivines
50:07 and piercings, which are full of metals when you look at those rocks and a little mentally. And they also have carriages found by Magna came before. When you
50:17 hydrogenate that or not hydrogenate, that's just when you take hydrogen and put it into an environment, but when you hydrate and you take the water and you start mixing it into a prototype and the
50:28 right pressures and depths and this is happening all over the ocean floors. It's happening in subduction zones. Sir Pentonite gets made. That's the rock, that's the rock. And so it loads up with
50:40 water and it loads up with a really beautiful green rock. And then the magic happens when you dehydrate that rock. Okay. And that's when you break it, right? Either a major heat event happens
50:54 like rifting and you get this big heat plume from the mantle up into the Sir Pentonite. The Sir Pentonite has to, it's volatile under heat or when it breaks and that water comes out. The water's up
51:05 to 13 weight percent. So you're talking billions and billions and billions and quadrillions fucking gallons of water. Yeah. It's a massive water release.
51:18 And then that's gonna ascend. That's gonna go right up, it's buoyancy. It's going to try to get up to the crust. And when it gets into the lower crust and mid crust, it starts to really start
51:28 playing games. You can end up with talc, right? You can end up with hydrothermal dolomites. Yup. There's
51:36 even evidence you can argue that some of these things that look like sandstones, they're not actually made from some eroding mountain that no one sees anymore, that sandstones with straight SiO2
51:46 could come from one of these brine dehydration events. So that can carry there as the serpentine and then deposited. So the serpentine's just releasing the volatiles. It's just getting rid of the
51:58 brine component. The rock stays there. And the only reason we have rock up at the surface where we can slab and make countertops out of it is 'cause major tectonic events got it from way deep where
52:08 this is happening to the surface in California, right? That massive seduction event, there's So pet night's all up and down Kellek. Okay. It's really cool, Rock. But the brine component, yeah.
52:20 The brine component could be is, in our opinion, the thing to really pay attention to. What's going on with the water and the gases from this major event? It's massive, you know, it's ocean
52:33 scale in size, you know. Interesting. Yeah, man. Going all in. Oh, we went way off there I don't even remember what we were talking about, but
52:47 that's really cool. I just got a little education there.
52:52 So we're still making oil. Yeah. The earth is still making oil. Yep. Yeah, all the, I believe all the drill holes that have been done that are still producing. That's just some kind of weird
53:04 fractionation event that just kind of keeps coming. Where's it all coming from? Where's all the water coming from? Where's all the brine coming from? And let alone all the oil that's been made And
53:12 that's hard to mask balance. from the idea that this layer made all of what we're seeing, that's hard to mass balance. It's been very obvious and well known. And we just kind of not very
53:27 interested in mass balancing that. But when I think when the reservoir just keeps giving this brine, where's it coming from? It has to be coming up, faults and fractures. And there's a deeper
53:38 process that's pummeling its way into that environment. And all we're doing is cooling and condensing and, you know, that's our drill holes and pumping is just changing its environment. I don't
53:48 know where it's coming from, but I don't know where it's going. It's all going back in the Delaware Mountain Group and the Permian Basin.
53:55 I'll love it. Man, I'd love to go drill some wells in there then. Okay, great. I got a friend that's, well, he just moved back to South Texas, but he was playing company man for a big disposal
54:05 group out in West Texas. And he was telling me about drilling these wells into, you know, the San Andreas and, Well, the Delaware Mound Group is where we dispose of a lot of this water, right?
54:16 Yeah. And he's like, yeah, those wells are 2, 000, 2, 500 PSI. I was like in a disposal zone. He's like, oh, yeah, as soon as we shoot them, we're at 2, 500 PSI. And I was like, in my
54:31 head, you know, a disposal zone should be on back. Like it should have plenty of pore space and we should be sucking all the salt water into it. Like it's a great place to get rid of salt water
54:40 Yeah, we've gotten rid of so much in West Texas that they're having to push it into that formation. Wow. And like you said earlier, bad cement jobs, casing designs that weren't, you know, that,
54:55 that didn't have this constraint 30 years ago. Yeah, it's a big cesspool out there. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, I would love to see what people are doing. And I know they are. They got to be
55:04 figuring out this bigger system that's recycling itself and kind of making itself in the Permian Basin. I don't think, uh, I think I want to be careful. I don't want to be canceled. You know what
55:17 I mean? On your first episode, but the Permian could be very much still an active system. There's definitely evidence that serpentization is involved. Yeah. You heard of the salado, right? That
55:28 huge salt layer across the top of the Delaware. Things full of weird.
55:34 Minerals that are made under extreme temperature and pressure and they're sitting at your is on top. Yeah, and then you got Herkimer diamonds that are in the Pecos River that have been found like
55:48 something really, really hot has come through there long before we have. Yeah, right. But still, like, and then you got the cave systems that people are still finding new caves and these things
56:00 look like they're like right now right now being made. Yeah. So that's just kind of like some end product of this active thing, you know, this big, geologic wound. The geology of the Permian is
56:13 unbelievable, man. It's just so fascinating how many different events have come through that to form the Permian. Really? Their geologic time. Oh man. See, isn't that interesting? Because
56:25 I've been oiling gas 15 years. I'm studying a little bit of geology right now. Oh yeah.
56:31 There's a lot of people much smarter than me. But I'm not dumb. And I just thought the Permian Basin was this basin that all this stuff was deposited in over the years and then as it sat there and
56:43 matured, it became oil. Right. You know, that's just the easy explanation that we get and we give. That's right. I guess. That's right. 'Cause it's so much simpler than going into all the
56:57 stuff that it took. Yeah. To make. Right. That's oil. That's right, man. That's right, that's going down a major rabbit hole right there. That's just like this big
57:09 and just a pool of it. I feel like we've been on a rabbit hole the whole time. Yeah, man. I thought it was going to be concise and we were just - I like it. It's good. At some point, I was
57:18 going to tell you - a joke I heard from my dad the other day. Nice. Only gas joke. Yeah. You might like this. You've hung out with some hippies. I know the geologists hanging out with the
57:27 hippies. Heck yeah. He said, why did the hippie join the oil field? Oh, man. This buddy told them that they trip all day. Dope comes in five gallon buckets And the joints are 32-foot long.
57:43 That just kept getting better. I'm telling you. If I was a hippie, I'd join the oil field, too, you know? You trip all day long. Oh, man. That's so good. I got to remember this. You trip
57:54 all day long. Your dope comes in five gallon buckets, and your joints are 32 and 12 feet long. Gosh, I love that. That's quality stuff. That's good. Thanks, Mr. Goodman. We don't have
58:06 hippies anymore. What do you mean? There's nobody's really hippie anymore
58:12 They're just like, all the kids are just kind of - What are you calling? I don't know, millennials?
58:18 Gen Zs. Gen Zs?
58:21 Don't wanna work on their iPad? We're just starting to hate dumb people. Yeah, they just, I mean, if I had the opportunity to sit there and watch a bunch of fake curves go up and down and I could
58:32 put money into one of them, I have no idea what it is. But I know that this thing has the opportunity to just go cycle it up and down like crazy I'd sit there and try to figure that game out all day
58:43 long. Isn't that crazy? I remember playing Baccarat when I was on my mom's computer back in like
58:49 98 windows, she had a slot machine game and I discovered Baccarat. Baccarat is so simple of like a patterned thing. You bet the banker or the player and you just kind of see what happens and you
59:01 just start playing back and forth and you just start winning all this cash. Like what, how am I even winning? I don't think anybody knows how they're winning in back red. They just like, they
59:10 just are and it just keeps, oh man, you get on a roll and boom, boom, boom, you stack up cash. I mean, so I feel like there's some truth to that. You know, here's an iPad and if you got, you
59:24 know, you got to have legit money and we have made a lot of money as Americans and our kids have access to a lot of cash. And they say some of it will get turned into like Xbox coins or PlayStation
59:37 coins or whatever. But if you got the right dad and mom and you're like, hey, don't you have a couple hundred thousand dollars? Like this works, let me play with it and boom, he's just sitting
59:49 there watching that stock go up and down on something that he has no idea what it's about. And then it could work, could totally work. We could drill a big oil well too. Hell yeah. And I don't
59:59 know what you're doing next month, but. Hey, threading me with a good time. I'll definitely be there, I'd love it. I love it. I love the smell of it. I love the hard work. I love the pain in
1:00:09 the ass about it. It's it to me it it going through such hard times sometimes for me was an eye opener of how amazing people really are. Really? That was that was that was a big takeaway for me. I
1:00:23 love the guys that busted ass in the field and helped me get what needed to get done and they knew how to do it safely and nobody was making good money in any of it but they were happy to be there and
1:00:35 they got my back and they saw me out there and I earned their respect by being out there in the trenches with them and got friends for life because of that yeah no matter what happens yeah right like
1:00:45 so to me that that that's what's bad about the iPad it's not getting out in nature not getting out and stressing yourself is I don't know it's not for me it's not even hard things my kids yeah things
1:01:00 are good yes dangerous stuff sucks and don't want anybody to get hurt How else are you gonna do it? You're just gonna hang out until something crazy happens and you have no chance of survival? Yeah.
1:01:11 Fuck that. Yeah. Like get after it, bust these knuckles and figure out where to put your hands and where you don't. Yeah. It's not good, you just use your head. Yeah. Now that is one thing
1:01:22 that definitely has not changed in the old field.
1:01:26 That respect for other folks and the brotherhood of being out there and doing things and getting stuff done
1:01:35 You know, you can meet somebody that you've never worked with before and you tell them kind of where you've been, what you've done and you've got respect from them and they'll watch your back and
1:01:45 you watch theirs and it's a brotherhood like none other. Now you show up with your shirt starched and your hard hat's too clean, like. They'll give you a hard time. This guy over here. They're
1:01:56 the second you get that thing dirty. That's right. They're like, Oh shit, okay. Yeah, he's not just, 'cause there is that thing where someone's making millions and millions of dollars on the
1:02:07 backs of someone making just enough to get their kids a new pair of shoes for Christmas. And that's a huge gap. And that's just the reality of it. We didn't start the fire. It's just how this
1:02:18 thing works. That's it. So we just freaking live in it. But I think that's another whole other thing of doing it yourself and getting out there and busting knuckles and finding wealth or finding
1:02:30 value and trying to generate a profit and being successful in that you can give such little things. You know some gift cards to the auto parts store to a restaurant. Like it goes so long because you
1:02:43 know it's you're down at that level. You're working at that level. You're living at that level and it's amazing. It makes no difference than if you're donating a million dollars to some non-profit.
1:02:52 Yeah. Like you're making a difference. Someone's life and it's a very positive experience Yeah. Yeah. Getting out there and learning. Getting out there and just doing the thing.
1:03:05 People are always asking, I don't know if it's always been this way, but they're like, well, how'd you do that? Or how do you get here? What's the process to do that? And I'm like, you just
1:03:14 got to get out there and do it. Like, I don't know, I can't tell you your way. Yeah, I can't tell you how you're supposed to do it. Um, I'm here for you, though, man. These are the things I
1:03:24 learned, this is where I messed up. Yeah, but like until you do something, you're not going to learn it. That's right. You got to go plan it all day long. Yeah, you just got at some point,
1:03:33 take the risk and. Yep, that's that old wild cat or spirit, but we've got to poke one here, you know, and see what comes up. Hell, yeah, no reason not to. Yeah. And then, and then what was
1:03:47 something to get completely off track. Nice. The idea that how can you, how can you go out and do that, right? Like put a prospect together and find the right people that make it all happen. And
1:03:59 then how do you deliver that value across? people that would never have the opportunity to invest and take a profit from that production somewhere in the future, right? If you wanted to sell some
1:04:09 of that off as a token, like through tokenization and what's happening in digital currency, right? Can you imagine if you had a Reed Goodman coin on all the oil you made? And someone was like,
1:04:19 Hell yeah, I'll buy that token. Sounds like a lot of paperwork that I don't like paperwork. Yeah, but how else can we take care of the people that live in that area besides the fact that there's
1:04:30 some tax money going back in there from production and that your local politicians are supposed to be taking care of you with that money? Yeah. Like if you got money and hey, this well came in and
1:04:38 yeah, I'm selling 30 of this thing as equity, like here it is. And then they go, Well, how's that work? And, Well, you're not going to paper them up and do all this stuff. Just give them an
1:04:47 app, give them an app on their phone and say, Hey, here's your pay into it and you're going to get a return back on that with the production that from this sale. Yeah. I don't know. You don't
1:04:55 know about you doing that? I know the concept is there. I think that. need to look into that more, because I feel like there's been two or three guys that have been like, we want to make oil and
1:05:05 gas investing available to everybody. But you know, traditionally we've had to be, you have to be a accredited investor. Yeah. And, you know, not to drill wells, I think that's true. Yeah.
1:05:20 Because you need to understand the risk. You have to be in a place where you know the risk you're taking. And you know the fact that your money just could go away, you could just be walking away
1:05:30 from a hole in the ground and lose it all. Yeah. But when you're selling production and you're selling yourself as a production company, yeah, that's a little different. A little bit. That's
1:05:41 your bad production company. Right. I mean, there's always going to be no, there's always going to be people that are trying to tell you I'm the greatest operator and they're not. But dude, the
1:05:51 things you're learning and what you know about operations and where you're going with operations, you would be a perfect candidate for something that says, no, I'm going to get this thing set up
1:05:60 where it's making this every day. And yeah, a pump will go out and maybe a line in the hole in the line, but that reservoir is going to talk to us every single day. We found a good reservoir.
1:06:12 Dude, sell that, sell that. Let other people get, get, get mailbox money and get some, some things going for their kids or whatever it is, right? And you don't need to sell it, like rake them
1:06:21 over the coals. Yeah, but give them some, give them some of it and take a little bit of money up front and take that money and go drill with it. Yeah. Go find something new. Yeah, that's
1:06:30 interesting. When I first, when I first started looking into some of these wells in South Texas, I noticed that trend of
1:06:39 a lot of it's splitting risks, but a lot of it's splitting a reward with all your buddies too. Yeah. Right. But we might drill this well. Let's say we drill 10 wells, okay, and we've got 10
1:06:50 operating companies. Everybody owns a tenth of every well. Whereas like, this is my prospect, then I know that it's gonna make a billion barrels of oil and we're all gonna have private jets next
1:06:59 week. I don't need any of you dudes. 'Cause if I'm gonna spend a million dollars, I'll just spend a million on mine 'cause it was the best prospect and we're gonna make a butt ton of oil. But what
1:07:10 I found out is as you go through and look at all these oils kind of in an area, well, there's 10 operating companies and everybody owned a tenth and everybody else's. And it's like, I still spent
1:07:20 a million dollars. But now I've got 10 chances That's right. You're getting my money back. And I get to help these guys do something, 'cause if I fail and he fails and he fails, you know, we're
1:07:34 three out of business. But this model, all 10 of us can survive. Yeah. No matter what. Yeah, that's nice. And so it was cool to see that. And at first, I was like, this is silly. It's
1:07:45 people, as I've gotten older, and as I've done some dumb things with my wells, and I'm like, man, I'm starting to get that. I had to stay with these guys for looking at you and calculate the
1:07:57 risk, man. Yeah. Yeah. And spread it out. Yep. Spread it out a little bit here, a little bit there. Increase your odds. Yeah. You're still gambling though. Yep. Yep. You got to still find
1:08:08 the sequence of data and information that has been put together systematically in a known discovery. Put that data together, stack up the new data the best you can and get an analog and de-risk that.
1:08:21 But at the end of the day, you're still best case scenario. You're still going to have 20, 30 risk and I mean, it's just the reality of it. Yeah. It could just not F and B there. Yeah. And
1:08:32 that's just part of it. Has that happened to you recently? No. Well, besides the fact that I went into an old reservoir and I thought, hey, let's see what happens. Yeah. But I didn't have all
1:08:42 the stacked up data. That was just a whim and an opportunity. It came so cheap, but then it cost so much on the the back end because yeah, I was so cheap to get in, but you had too many problems
1:08:54 to deal with for it to be economic. Yeah. And it turned into a cool science project, so we'll still pursue that. Are you allowed to talk about the wells? Not the tight hole, but the rest of the
1:09:05 wells that you're drilling, you contract in or y'all try to keep that pretty down low. Yeah, they do. I gotcha, okay, okay. Cool, I find that cool. So let me ask you a question kind of on
1:09:12 that note Spacing, conventional spacing. Your geologist, maybe you can kind of lay me out a little better on how, why this works, right? So I've got some shallow wells in La Verne. Our spacing
1:09:12 is two acres per well. Yeah. Okay, that's
1:09:38 a little pressure. Low pressure, not as much overburden. Sure. Create the pressure at the formation. Yeah, no gas drive. It's just gonna have a weak water drive, yeah Yeah, I've got some
1:09:50 whales in DeWitt County. that are 4, 500 feet, spacing jumps up to 40 acres. Should have more pressure and all that going on, yeah. A little bit more pressure. Not as much at the surface,
1:10:01 right? Like you're overburdening your hydrostatic, kind of like balance out, where I get a little bit more at the surface, but I don't have a ton of pressure.
1:10:08 And then, you know, looking at some gas wells that are 10, 000, 10, 500 feet. Get 'em. And they're like super high pressure. Scream 'em. And they're over pressure for another reason, right?
1:10:20 Not from overburden, but from the - Some geologic process that's coming at you. Yeah, from being thermally over mature, right? They've turned into gas and they've pressured up.
1:10:33 So talk to me about like spacing and drainage area.
1:10:38 Well. As a geologist, like,
1:10:42 it's just effectively draining what you can because the oil can't be pushed from any further away Thank you.
1:10:50 as far as like you're wondering why the rules change between fields or like how does it actually work? How do you think about the spacing between wells? Yeah, because why wouldn't we just, even
1:11:04 with these shallow wells, right? Why won't we just put them 10 acres apart and then each well makes what five wells would have made if they were on two-acre spacing? Well, the low pressure and
1:11:16 shallow wells is you have a real influx problem. Right. You shut your well in and you might get, what, a couple hundred feet above pump on your fluid level. And then you turn your pump on for
1:11:27 like an hour and you're down to the pump. Yeah. Right. You don't have the, the reservoir is not going to take, it's going to take 10 wells to depressurize and migrate that low pressure into the
1:11:40 wells and above pump to get that fluid off. And then if you have five, it's just going to take just as long. You know, it's like, you're not not draining more. You're draining more if you can
1:11:52 get them connected. Gotcha. And get them, get it all depressurized the best you can. Yeah. I think that's what's going on there. Yeah. So it's not a factor of trying to, uh, trying to drain
1:12:05 it faster. It's that if you don't put enough wells, it doesn't get drained. Takes longer. So I think that drilling the tight spacing does actually get you your recovery a little bit faster on your
1:12:16 rock. If you do less drilling, will you make just as much oil? There's an argument that it's possible, but I feel like with the low, with the low shallow wells and why they allow operators to do
1:12:30 that is because the past showed that it's not the case. Gotcha. That you drill, you want, you want to drill less wells and make just as much oil. Right. Cause it, it costs less money to drill
1:12:40 less wells. Yeah. But it's just not how the reservoir is naturally bleeding out, just doesn't have a drive, doesn't have a drive. good water drive, a good gas drive, or whatever the mechanism
1:12:53 is going to be. Interesting. And so even if we were to go in and fracture, do some of this hydraulic fracturing on the shallow wells, we may or may not be able to touch the rest of that rock.
1:13:06 Well, you're going to get a flush. You're going to definitely touch a bunch up front, make a big pathway
1:13:13 And maybe that gets you connected to a bigger drive, your mechanical drive might be weaker if you just perforated those wells and you didn't frack, but since you fracked and you drove that into the
1:13:25 real system, or the bigger system, maybe you got more of a water drive to your wells now or more of a gas solution drive to your wells because you opened up more rock from the frack, maybe, but
1:13:36 eventually it's just going to decline to get back to kind of where it was Yeah, unless you refrag, you know, do tertiary stuff, yeah, yeah, over and over and over. Yeah, that's right, try to
1:13:48 make a profit. And hope that what you spend and what you make are kind of somewhere on the, you know, even keel. That's right, yeah, water flood that thing.
1:14:00 Take some of these brines from somewhere.
1:14:04 Go in there and start converting some carriage and huh? Heck yeah, push it in, see what happens. Superheat it, before you push it in. Yeah, yep, ionize it, just like Michael's talking about.
1:14:14 Ionize it, huh? Yup I'm really gonna have to look into that. It's cool, that's what our patent's really all about at the end of the day. Yeah. That's what we've done, that's what we've
1:14:23 presented, and that's what we think is going on, for sure. Man, there's just so many ideas out there to try. Yeah. Oh yeah, and I'm like so into trying all of them. Heck yeah. But I don't
1:14:37 have enough money to try all of them.
1:14:40 You know, I never did the inhydrous ammonia deal.
1:14:45 Still want to do that. I might have the money to do that now, but I just want to get rid of that lease Yeah, I don't have time to I haven't been out there like a month. Oh, man, you know, yeah
1:14:54 It's hard to go pump that lease. So we were talking about doing that on and so I just kind of shut it in right now because Yeah, I remember that you were You were talking about doing that. Yeah,
1:15:04 great idea, but I think that would be cool That would add a bunch of pressure to that formation right and you know, it's definitely I don't know. There's just too many Too many ideas and not enough
1:15:15 money to go do it all. Yeah, or just yeah Yeah, the opportunity where you have enough information to make a good decision on which one you're gonna choose and why yeah Maybe that's another hard
1:15:27 part. You know what? What data do you really have as well used to make this oil cuz Landowner claimed it did right years ago, right?
1:15:38 Wildcat
1:15:41 Yeah, well, I appreciate you coming on
1:15:45 Yeah, man. Anything you really wanted to cover, we haven't covered? Nah, nah, I just came on thinking we would talk about oil and gas, man, that's what we did. Yeah. It was good, it was fun.
1:15:57 I'm glad you brought up that stuff with Mike. That was a great, that was a stimulating conversation. I still talk to him. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, cool. Yeah, that guy. I'm definitely gonna be
1:16:07 in touch with him, yeah. Well, you know, I made that comment about like company man and consultants, right? And Mike's one of those, we've got a lot of examples of it right now. We've got guys
1:16:19 of like 35, 40, 50 years of experience that are being sidelined. 'Cause we don't need their experience right now. We don't need their experience in the show world. We just need some 35 year old
1:16:32 that has well control certification that's gonna pick up the phone and call when something doesn't meet the SOP. Wow. You know?
1:16:40 It's hard. It's tough because there's a bunch of those guys like might looking for work right now where they're trying to, you know, and you know, he would do that guy will do anything. Yeah. To
1:16:51 get back into drilling rock looking for oil. That's it. And that, you know, I mean, you know, that's, that's hard to find. Yeah. Right. And you read Palooza came out and
1:17:04 that dude's like, I am so ready for any opportunity, man. I just, let's get back into it Let's cut new rock and let's go after it, man. There's still so much out there. He knows it. Same with
1:17:14 my father-in-law. My father-in-law did it for a long time and
1:17:18 he's just chomping at the bit. He loves the idea of wildcat. And let's go after lithium brian. Let's go after copper, gold, whatever it is. Put a challenge in front of these people and they're
1:17:27 going to love that. Yeah. That's. They love the challenge. Yeah. That's, I think it's that more than the money. Yeah, heck yeah it is. Like a lot of these guys don't need the money anymore
1:17:39 Well, how about that, but. They're like true, like, I don't think so. I think some of those guys, 'cause how rough it is, they know how dangerous it is and how rough that work is. If they had
1:17:51 FU money, I would think they would probably be checked out. But if they don't, and they know they're capable of doing it and it has the potential to get to that money
1:18:01 that they know is there, those are the guys that we gotta find. And we gotta build that Rolodex. And when that project comes, all of them or some of them are gonna be key components to making that
1:18:12 project successful. They're gonna live there. They're just gonna breathe in and smell it and make sure that it's done right. I told my wife that. I said, Hey, when we go to drill this wellin
1:18:21 Duvall County, I am, I'm gonna be gone for like three weeks. Sorry, like you and the kids have fun. Like, I will see you in three weeks. I love you, we've got FaceTime. I'll have sales areas.
1:18:37 from building the location, to putting it on pump and flowing it back. I want to be hands on and all of it.
1:18:45 Like that's gambling for me. Like I don't really care to go to, you know, Lake Charles or Windstar up in Oklahoma and like just
1:18:54 watch my money go away. 100, 000 surf club up in Austin or whatever it is. Dude, I couldn't do it. I would never, I would never walk into Kishata with50, 000 in my pocket. But50, 000 in an
1:19:09 old well? Oh my God, dude, that's a bargain for four barrels a day. Like let's try that one, you know what I mean? It's just a whole different, but it's my addiction, I guess. My drug. Oh
1:19:20 yeah, it's a good one, man. It's a lot worse, definitely a lot worse. Now what, in your opinion, what is it that gets a wild catter like off his back, right? like he's just sitting on a pile
1:19:29 of
1:19:35 money. He knows people in the industry. He's looking for home runs. He doesn't really get excited, but like, what is it? Is it all about the IRR, like, or whatever, and the money back, or is
1:19:47 it the story? Yeah, I think there's two kinds of guys. There's guys that are like spreadsheet guys. And they're all about, there's guys that wanna win financially. And there's guys that wanna
1:20:02 win through the drill bit, right? Yeah They discovered a new reservoir, and we named it the Goodman number three. Hell yeah. You know, there's those guys. And then there's the guys. So I had a
1:20:15 fella in Midland tell me,
1:20:18 I wanted him to drill some Eagleford Wells. And I was trying to raise a couple million dollars for him. And I went and met with him and he's like, you know, read, this looks great. Money was
1:20:29 gonna be back in 13 months. They have all his money back in 13 months. Very well proven, lots of wells around it. Like this was standard shell. We knew pretty well what our EUR was gonna be,
1:20:42 right? Yeah. I said, Ray, this looks great. But I can get my money back in eight months in the Delaware. So I'm gonna put my money in the Delaware. And I'm like, are you kidding me, man?
1:20:54 This is a home run to me, you know? 13 months we'll have all of our money back and then we'll just be cruising and we buy in jets and yachts and cufflinks and whatever else, you know, and it
1:21:05 wasn't fast enough for him. Yeah. And I would consider that guy, you know, I think a lot of folks would consider that guy a wildcatter 'cause he's been in the industry 30 or 40 years. He's
1:21:18 drilled, you know, he drilled a bunch of those wolfberry whales at first, but his mindset has changed in the last 15 years. Heck yeah. It's velocity of money. Yeah, you got 8. Yeah, over here
1:21:28 and you're telling them 13, all you had to do was say, Oh, I'm sorry. That was a typo, it was 8. What did I say?
1:21:35 Yeah. And you'd be like, Oh, okay. Yeah, let me just, here's a couple million dollars. Just stroke that check for you. It's funny how that works. I mean, that guy came from taking risk on
1:21:43 shit that probably had a freaking 98 failure. And he only made 1 of his money back or less or whatever, 'cause he did, but now he thinks he's, you know, he's got the right combination of
1:21:55 information that just keeps banking and money on it, and - That's right. I wonder what happened with that 8 of the Delaware. Yeah. I wonder if he actually got that on that money versus what you
1:22:05 were presenting or not. Yeah. Yeah, so it's a
1:22:10 repeatability deal for him.
1:22:14 But then I think there's folks out there that, you know, very well, they're not gonna stroke the check for the whole well, but I'll take 10 Absolutely.. I
1:22:24 wanna see that happen And I think a lot of it too at this point. Um, some of the folks that I'm talking to,
1:22:32 they don't need the money. They would like the money. They don't have FU money, but they're pretty well off. And they're like, we would like to see, read, do well. We would like to see you
1:22:43 drill a good well. We'd like you. So you start talking about the story, right? We like you. We like the project. We like what you're doing and what you're going for. Um, and I just want to see
1:22:56 that you're comfortable with what's about to happen. Yeah. That's all they're looking at. They're not even worried about the number you're saying. Yeah, of course you're trying to make them money.
1:23:03 Absolutely. You want to see that it's something that you actually want to do. Yeah, it's awesome. They're like, well, we'll bet50, 000 on it. Sure. You know, we'll bet100, 000 on that. And,
1:23:13 um, and I don't, you know, I hope that doesn't come across in anyway, like egotistical about me. Um, but it's, it's, you know, you build that trust with those people and they see that by how
1:23:25 you operate. Right, how you do your business day in and day out. You earned it, you earned that, it was taken, yeah. Yeah. Heck yeah. So then there's a lot of those folks, and I think that's
1:23:35 how most conventional wells are getting drilled right now.
1:23:39 Conventional well you think from like spud
1:23:43 to fluid in the tanks, what would you say the average amount of money is being spent on something like that? Half a million? Oh shoot, it depends on depth, right? Sure. So like 5, 000 foot
1:23:55 well. Mm-hmm. Middle of the road. 5, 000 foot well, you're looking at about a million. Oh wow. Anywhere from 900, 000 to 11 would be that 4, 500 to 6, 000 feet. To drill it and get fluid
1:24:07 into the tanks. Yep, yep.
1:24:11 I've seen some of these deeper Wilcox wells.
1:24:17 Two and a half million. You know, 10, 000, 11, 000 feet. Wow Two. and a half million. Damn, dude, I can't believe how deep that is. I don't have any interest to go in that deep. All right
1:24:28 now, I feel like there's plenty of prospects out there that are less than eight, for sure. Yeah. And can bring you back that incredible money, you know, since I think so. Well, and that's
1:24:41 what's so interesting about it too, is like you've got the guaranteed return, not guaranteed, but more of a surefire return on the shale, but you know, a good conventional well, and you're
1:24:54 planning on an eight to 10 X your money. You put a million dollars in to drill it, you're planning to make eight to 10 million dollars out of it. Which, that show
1:25:05 well, you put seven million dollars in, and like you're pretty happy if you're getting, you know, 12, 14 million dollars out. Yeah, all right. All right. All right. And so, it's a different
1:25:19 game. But
1:25:21 risk and reward, right?
1:25:24 That's where you get your tolerance, I guess. You're willing to make that big reward. That's a good point, man. You willing to go horizontal? Always, nice. Always. I like being horizontal.
1:25:40 Yeah, I am.
1:25:43 My geologist is getting so mad at me if I said too much. Looking at a big play, trying to farm out some acreage, and hopefully
1:25:53 we drill some horizontal wells and test some left behind stuff. And you know what's interesting about it is, he and I have had this conversation over and over and over. Do we drill half a dozen
1:26:04 verticals and complete 'em and get some baseline on this reservoir and then go in and drill a horizontal to get a more formation contact? Yeah. Or do we just - Basically slow play the Wolfberry play,
1:26:19 right? Yeah. Wolfberry was done by economic, vertical wells,
1:26:24 Proved to be a horizontal target. So it's part of the de-risking. Yeah. Yeah, get an acreage position and drill good vertical wells, get at least cuttings through your target zone so you can get
1:26:35 some Rocky Val paralysis. We're doing full core. Nice, no shit. Yeah, on the first two wells, we'll do full core. All two wells? Yeah. And then just start doing it off of logs and cuttings.
1:26:47 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you should be all right. I mean, cuttings is the science there is really, really good for cutting, so, especially for Rocky Val paralysis. So, yeah, heck yeah, hit it and
1:26:58 get some data back and show that those vertical wells can bring something back.
1:27:05 Yep, I like it. I think that's absolutely the thing to do. You think we ought to go vertical first? Heck yeah. Yeah, and then shoot a 3D size next. 3D size and it's not that expensive. Yeah.
1:27:16 I was blown away, I called Dawson on that lithium thing and he said, yeah, here's the quote.
1:27:23 I said, That's processed on a PSTM or whatever. And they said, Sure. Wow. So that's pretty cheap. And if you got 10 wells going in and then the seismic on the back of that, now you know where
1:27:34 to connect the dots. Yeah, I have a real interpretation going in that to de-risk it. Yeah. No, I think they play 600, 000 acres. 600, 000 acres. Oh, geez. I only need about20 million to go
1:27:50 do this, do it right Is that a much for 600, 000, you said 600, 000? Well, that's not to lease up 600, 000, but I think the play is 600, 000. That's how big it is. Yeah. The problem is a
1:28:00 bunch of the area is already leased by other folks. Okay. So we're trying to get farmouts from some of the majors. Okay. Some of the super majors. And I'm a nobody. They don't want to give me
1:28:10 the time of day. Yeah. Now if I was, you know, if I was. Diamondback or whatever, you know, name your small independent to large private deal. Yeah. You just got to meet the right people.
1:28:24 You can start hanging out with geologists, hanging out with landmen. That's what I ought to do. I love that shit. Rubbing shoulders with the petroleum plug. That's good shit. But yeah, if the
1:28:34 right name walked into that same office and said, I want to farm out this acre, just they'd be like, Yeah, here it is. Yeah, they're going to drill, you're going to have our drilling claws,
1:28:43 you know, handed for us, like, Yeah, they'll take that all day. Exactly. I'm a nobody. So they're like, I don't know. We're not interested right now. We're just going to sit on this for a
1:28:51 while and let somebody else prove it out, which is going to be us, like, five sections over. And then, so. But that's what we're trying to figure out. How do we just get enough acreage? You
1:29:03 know, like, I don't need to be two-boom pickens, right? Like, but we'd like to be able to buy a new truck, you know?
1:29:12 Like, there's a reasonable amount here of acreage that makes it worthwhile. That's interesting. So that is a big deal. I'm surprised you've been talking about this much of it. 'cause that's, you
1:29:23 know, you're talking about, yeah, basically having something underneath everyone's, they're all going like, Well, you know that I don't. But you know what's interesting about that is that
1:29:33 this one in particular, they know it's there, they've seen it, everybody's written it off, but it's not the only one.
1:29:42 YGL's just got four other, not even in this basin, in other basins. Four others that are lined up that he's already started working on, like, hey, there's this behind pipe stuff that people just,
1:29:53 they're so focused on going to what they're going to right now to get their returns. They're not looking at all the other stuff they're punching through. Wow. And that's happening all over the
1:30:02 place. I believe it. Yeah, heck yeah. People get hyper-focused. You talk about the story. Like, that's where a lot of this stuff, particularly in South Texas, is undrilled. Because oil
1:30:16 crashed
1:30:19 in '86, And it, that drilling program just got. ex-nade, you know, and nobody ever picked it back up. That's right, fields went extinct. Or one guy, you know, forgot to order KCL,
1:30:36 you know, and he just did it with fresh water. And it all swelled up and it's like, Oh, the whole field's bad. It's like, Well, wait a second. And you just start thumbing through some of this
1:30:45 stuff. And that story makes a difference. Big time. Yep Yeah. I don't like it. I'm gonna finish the rest of that whistle pig. Uh-oh.
1:30:56 I didn't leave you a whole lot. No, you didn't. That's okay. It's funny, I was just learning about whistle pig over the weekend. Did you take that trip to Garrison Brothers? No. For uh.
1:31:08 You're talking about the Southwest section, APG. Yeah. I
1:31:13 heard all about it. I've been hearing about it for a year. It's soft, but I know, man. Should've known.
1:31:20 Wasn't in the cars this year, sorry, Trey Cortez. If
1:31:25 there will be more, there will be more. And what's this, he said he brought in a Japanese whiskey. Some Japanese, something really. Let's see. I thought I'm trying to take advantage of your
1:31:36 whiskey collection, you know what I think. Coffee grain whiskey. Huh, yeah.
1:31:44 anything about that huh I don't know if it's pronounced is it Nicka you think it's Nicka oh there's two Ks
1:31:53 I just don't well I hear the Japanese in it there was one K would be Nica Nica or maybe it's a Nica that's a little more Japanese huh okay what's the Japanese alphabet do you know that after what how
1:32:07 do they pronounce three alphabets yeah so this probably Japan has three alphabets no yeah I mean how does that make any sense 45 alcohols it's not very strong coffee 40 45 not very strong no hell no
1:32:23 whistle pig what did it say 50 yeah oh come on now 100 proof 50 a little whistle and pig yeah yeah
1:32:35 I don't know
1:32:37 oh it's same port from Scotland.
1:32:41 Shut the front door, they're lying to us. Bottling in Japan, it definitely says it's imported from Scotland, though. Cool, still gonna try it. Yeah,
1:32:57 get rid of this whistling pig. Even though this stuff, that's legit, whistle pig. Get a little. You liked it? You know it's all right, here's all right. I don't like spicy stuff. I'm not
1:33:09 really into spice, so I got some. It wasn't too bad. Trade quartet. Oh, you still got those ice? Oh, those ice cubes are gone, huh? Oh, no, they're in the other room. That's all right.
1:33:18 Yeah. What old trade teacher? He's a big whistle pig guy. I would be curious on what he said about what does he say about it? Well, oh man, it says no smell to it.
1:33:33 Or does that mean I'm not, I got an Uber home.
1:33:38 Yeah.
1:33:40 a little uncouth around here, are we? Yeah, so tell me about the name of the show. Tell me about the concept. Tell me what, you know, that's your first episode of many. Yeah. You're gonna
1:33:49 record what? Once every other week, every three days? Yeah, we'll record every other week, so I don't have to be in Houston every week. We'll probably do two episodes every other week. That way
1:33:59 we can try to get everybody in episode every week. Get something regularly. Nice But
1:34:07 the whole idea was just,
1:34:10 originally it was, there was a little conversation about having like, having like a little conventional miniseries with, on collide, with digital wildcatters. And
1:34:23 we're gonna have Chad and Mike on, probably in the next episode. And they were gonna be part of the miniseries. And I was like, whoa, wait a second. Conventional oil and gas, like if there's
1:34:34 125 years of oil and gas history, conventional oil and gas was the first 100 or 110 years of it. we can't distill that down into two or three episodes.
1:34:48 So we need a whole, we need a whole show about all these guys that have been doing this for 40, 50, 60 years, and record that knowledge where we can't, right? And so last week, I tried to meet
1:35:05 with my uncle Pootsie and he's 88 and
1:35:10 get him on the show. I did, I went and sat with him and his mind is going a lot faster than I realized. And I brought these mics, these DJI mics with me and we flipped them on and I must have had
1:35:24 a setting wrong because they didn't pick up the audio very well. So Jacob's going to see if we can
1:35:31 scrap some of that, you know, a little bit at least. But Pootsie
1:35:36 started at nine years old working on a workover rig. He was hanging out with his buddies, and they were at the local stockyard, and one of the oil company men drove up and said, Hey, we need
1:35:49 somebody with small hands to get to this bolt for us, and he hopped in the truck, and he never left, you know. But
1:35:57 anyway, so I want to take a bunch of that knowledge and get on here and go down some of these rabbit holes and really record
1:36:07 anything we can from these old guys before they pass away. That's great. Right? Or before they quit, and they're no longer available to us because we're going to move back to a lot of this, and I
1:36:16 don't want to lose that knowledge. And I think AI and language learning models are great for the data we have, but there's some data that's not recordable
1:36:27 in spot fire or in a spreadsheet, like it's just, it's not there, right? But I think having this time with folks that are in
1:36:38 Conventional oil and gas or have been a conventional oil and gas This and it's more of a More of a mindset Right doesn't always necessarily mean that we're in a vertical hole. Okay, so it's more of
1:36:53 a mindset of like How can I make this work? How can I make this economic for my company? How can we survive here? Have we how can we push on to the next one? How do we write out the highs and the
1:37:07 lows? And still be around, you know, in 30, 40, 50 years. Yeah, you got to find a good reservoir. That's for damn sure. Conventional reservoirs is it unconventional to me just, you know,
1:37:19 what's your definition? I'm curious on what's your difference on on conventional versus unconventional? Where do you draw the line? Ah, that's a hard one, right? Um, I think the easy I think
1:37:34 the easy definition is to drill a horizontal. and do multi-stage fracturing. That's unconventional. That's unconventional, okay. Right?
1:37:46 That's what George Mitchell got right in the late '90s. Okay. He finally figured out how to drill this lateral, how to do multiple stages, how to pump this slurry with a prop in it. Right. That
1:38:01 kind of like kicked off the unconventional. The reason I say that kind of gets hard is 'cause like Clayton Williams in the late '80s was drilling horizontals. You can't just say horizontals. He was
1:38:12 drilling horizontals and completing him as open holes in the Austin chalk. And making banger whales out of it. But that's a conventional reservoir that he just went up that he went up. Conventional
1:38:21 reservoir. Horizontally. He just got more contacted. And so for me, the unconventional is where we did the horizontals and we did the multiple stages of stimulation. In a shell, in a really
1:38:36 unpermeable.
1:38:38 like a rock that would just never will work conventionally. Like it just will never deliver. Yeah, you know, Brian McDowell? Oh yeah, I will. Zapata? That's how you say it. McDowell,
1:38:49 magnetic. That's how you pronounce it. So
1:38:53 I sent some data to Brian. It's like, Hey, what do you think about this reservoir? I'm looking at fracturing it. And, you know, just kind of once your thoughts on it. And I was like, you know,
1:39:05 it's a shell. And he looks at it and he's like, Oh, that's 08 milli-darsies, that's not a shell. It had good perm. He's like, That's great perm, 08 milli-darsies. That's great permies. Like,
1:39:14 we're not even talking nano-darsies here. And I'm like, Dude, are you kidding me right now? Like, you know, crack it. Good permability to me is like three, four, 500 milli-darsies, you know?
1:39:26 In an unconventional? In a conventional. In a conventional. Yeah. Yeah, what's your scale there? Can you dumb that scale down for me? I always forget, like, what's concrete? Like a shoot of
1:39:38 a Darcy. Yeah, yeah, you have whole Darcy's. And are there many reservoirs that have a Darcy? When you talk about naturally fractured dolomite, you got hot dyes going down hallways. Yeah. Hell
1:39:50 yeah. Yeah, you got huge perm. Yeah, yeah, a lot of the sands that I look at in South Texas, the productive zones that I've been looking at, right? And this is my limited scope from limited
1:40:05 years. Is anywhere between 60, 70 millidarsies up to like, if we have 700 or 800 millidarsies, that's like we're gonna flow all the fluid we can through it. Like we can't pump that one off. Nice.
1:40:19 Kind of deal. So to explore for a conventional reservoir, just from a porosity permeability standpoint, what data logs, like how do you do that? Do you look for core that has those kinds of
1:40:33 results? and then you extrapolate from that core position, That's rare, that's really good rock. Yeah, yeah, so like the prospect we're looking at right now has logs on it, wireline logs, give
1:40:50 us,
1:40:53 let's see. It's got spontaneous potential, so we can see this formation pretty well, it's got porosity, it's got gamma. Resistivity. Resistivity, and so
1:41:05 what happened with it was they dry hold two wells that they drilled up dip
1:41:12 in the '50s. And in the '60s, there's this 20 foot sand that had very low resistivity, so they didn't think there was any oil in it. Just
1:41:25 wet. They shot one of those sands in like '64, just to try it, right? On the way out, shoot everything but the pumper, right? So they shot one of those wells
1:41:37 And it came in really well. And so then that was the discovery of this sand. Low resistivity oil. Yeah, 17 ohms. I don't know what that goes by, but that's just weird, yeah. I think a lot of
1:41:51 stuff under two ohms, folks didn't really look at until maybe the late 80s unless it was a known formation.
1:41:59 So it's like a fresh, it's just a fresh water component to the oil, or what's throwing the, what's throwing the resistivity, that's weird But how do you get your permeability though at the end of
1:42:09 the day, that's what you need to, that's how you find the reservoirs you're looking for, you want to go off to perm, right? Well so that one has a high perm, to me a high perm, four to 500
1:42:18 millidarces. So that's been measured with core or what? That's been measured, yeah. Okay. And that's on the scout tickets from the other wells that were drilled there in the 60s to the 80s. Yeah.
1:42:27 Put some permeability tests on the scout tickets. Yeah. That is. So then you extrapolate, you see the responses and then you start extrapolating from there And then I pick that sand and I try to -
1:42:37 Follow it, update. Yeah. And got good structure control. Pretty good. Like I said, I don't know. It could be six wells, it could be 14 wells. Ooh, nice. We don't know because we don't know
1:42:50 where the fault is on the top side. Oh, okay. And
1:42:57 where this old geologist, he's 83. Get him on the show. Dude. I'm gonna know his definition of a conventional We ought to,
1:43:07 where Jim thinks the fault is. I've had a, you know, Colton Dudley. Yeah. Colton Dudley and I sat in his kitchen for like four hours. Yeah, that's where the magic happens. Going through Petra
1:43:18 and printing out logs and trying to find where, why he thinks the fault is where it is. I had this geologist come up with this shit. Dude, and we like, we're like, yes, we know there's a fault
1:43:32 somewhere
1:43:34 On this map, we know there's a fault somewhere here. Like where you draw on the line. But he drew one in and there's not enough throw for the well-controlled to be like, boom, it's right there.
1:43:45 Yeah.
1:43:47 But that's where I say like the dude's been doing it for 50 years. And so I've asked a couple of other operators in the area that have drilled as well. So I'm like, hey, how confident would you be
1:43:56 about Jim picking a fault? They're like, Jim's pretty good. I was like, yeah, but we can't like verify it on well-controlled Like the dude, just like he sees it, he's good. It's a, there's a
1:44:08 little bit of art with geology, right? There's a little bit of like black magic there. Absolutely. Haven't done it all those years. So anyways, you know, for what we could prove, it could be
1:44:18 six wells, it could be 14. You don't have any seismic available in the area. No seismic on this. There's not nearly fours. Not nearly, okay, you got seismic around it though. Two-ish miles
1:44:28 away? Yeah, heck yeah, use it If it's cut in that same rock. use it and try to get an idea of what the throw and the heave, you know, what angles are they going at? And then maybe that's what
1:44:39 he did. Yeah. And it's a down to the coast fault. We can see a fault on seismic a couple miles down towards the coast. And yeah,
1:44:51 Israel only got about 40 foot of throw. Have you done gravity magnetics over him? Not done any of that nonsense. Yeah, I think sometimes get a structure, you know, a liniment. I think it's
1:45:03 sometimes, especially if you go like Earthfield with Bill Cathy, that guy's great. Yeah, not expensive. You know, probably has the data because he's been doing it for so long. Yeah. And get
1:45:16 him to try to try to tie logs and your depth of basement and then get some linements going and see if he can't see it
1:45:26 Sure. There's going to be some ways to to do that pretty cheap, you know, to try to try to figure that out. But back to the point. Yeah, your conventional reservoir needs a lot of permeability
1:45:36 and needs drive, right? And needs drive and, yep. To me, mine's a little bit more, I don't know if it's detailed, but the unconventional to me is something that you basically, you gotta do
1:45:48 something to make it work. Like, I want a well flowing. That's what I call conventional. I want conventional oil, make a river on the surface of the earth, like they did in the 20s. Yeah.
1:45:58 That's conventional to me, man. Yeah You go artificial lift or fucking whatever. You gotta do any kind of stimulation, any kind of BS. That to me is unconventional, especially chemical
1:46:10 treatments and stuff like that. Yeah, but we've been doing, you know, we've been fracturing reservoirs. We've like induced permeability since the 50s. Yeah, strong fricking, what are they?
1:46:24 I'm nitrous. Yeah. Are they ready to stick in these coats? Just blowing up trees and shit Yeah, I'm all for it.
1:46:32 That's an interesting way to think about it. If you have to induce,
1:46:36 I don't know.
1:46:38 It's a hard definition. Yeah. I know for one thing, I'd rather have a conventional reservoir than an unconventional one. Yeah. It's true. That's what I'd, a good conventional versus a good
1:46:49 unconventional, that's what I mean. Yeah. For tat, what's good and conventional is 10, 100 times better than a good unconventional one. Yeah. Heck yeah. Easy to drill, easier to produce,
1:46:60 just good 40 gravity crude.
1:47:04 Hell yeah. Sold a load of 46 gravity this morning. Nice, buddy. Man, that's almost good enough to run the lawnmower with. Almost, I've thought about it at last. Maybe he's changed the oil real
1:47:17 quick. We're gonna get way down this hole.
1:47:22 So this geologist, the one I was just talking about, Jim. Yeah. He owns some property, one property over from me Okay.
1:47:32 We've taken over and started operating the well that's on his progress. So we've become pretty good friends and then his son Andy and I have become really good friends and Andy Ranches for a living
1:47:42 was a land man for 30 years. Oh, wow. Cool. And we're not like way out there on the whole like a shit hit the fan. What are we going to do? But we've definitely talked about what CB channel
1:47:54 we're going to be on. Who's got what am I going? Guns wise, you know, I mean, like I can't say the conversation hasn't come out Right. All right. So
1:48:05 talking to Andy, he's like, hey, yeah, I need you to tell me a little bit more about that. Oh, you're making out of our well. And I was like, all right. Yeah, sure. I can. I'll send you
1:48:14 some stuff. He's like, well, do you have any breakdowns of like, you know, what, what sea chains are in the C6, C7, C8? And I'm like, where are you going with this, Andy? It's like, well,
1:48:24 I got a buddy that designs for fineries. Oh, cool. And I want to build this little backyard refinery. But like at the end of the world, we could take that oil and we'd get at least make like some
1:48:35 semblance of gasoline and diesel to run our vehicles on. Oh yeah, I love where this is going. Oh man, so we spent like three days with this money, like designing what this would look like. We
1:48:48 haven't built it yet. And apparently temperature controls like a big thing, refinery. So I'm an upstream guy, like this is fully downstream, right? Yeah, totally Or my little house,
1:48:60 but apparently temperature control is a pretty big deal, but other than that, put some pop off valves on it, we're probably not gonna blow anybody up, you know? So
1:49:10 that well has a ton of that oil out of that reservoir, has a ton of those like C8s through C20s, which is like perfect for gasoline and diesel. Wow That's great. He was trying to talk me, I've
1:49:27 got an old, I've got like a 77. uh, forward tractor. Okay. He's like, dude, just, just put like one tank of straight hole in there and see if it runs. I'm like, you, you should do it in
1:49:38 your tractor first. And like, he's like, man, just try it. At least do a chemical analysis on it. Come on. So see what you really got. If I do it, I'll film it. Yeah. Well, if you do it,
1:49:50 I'll pay for the lab analysis. Okay. You've got to do a full analysis on that just to see what you're actually trying to burn versus 87 octane out of the pump, you know. Right. Yeah. I mean,
1:50:02 it's an old diesel tracker. It's low compression. It'll probably run it. But
1:50:09 anyways, how did I get on that rabbit hole? But it's just good stuff, man. I love my conventional whales close to the house. And that's really what I've been focusing on, because, like you said,
1:50:21 they're going to keep giving for a long time. And more of them. Yep. Yep. Be an approved and operator. and keeping costs down. And
1:50:34 we need to get together and figure out, I think there's two or three more wells to drill in that field. You know, when you look, what you were saying earlier about recovery factors, like our oil
1:50:47 in place, you got me now wondering if our like original calculated oil in place, is just some bogus number out of the air. I believe there was in this field, which is 30, I don't know, we've
1:50:59 talked about it on wildcatters, 3, 500 acres, there was about 4 million barrels of oil in place, and we've just produced a little less than 400, 000 barrels out of it, 10, 10 recovery. A lot
1:51:11 of oil left to get there, but now I'm wondering if it's recharging itself, and. Can you be a catalyst somehow? A whole lot more there and how we get it out. Right. Anyways. That's cool. Yeah,
1:51:25 I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. really in place is definitely a big, big deal. I've been doing that since 2014, watching petrophysicists and engineers kind of come up with that
1:51:38 idea.
1:51:42 There's something to it, but there's, I think there's in some, if you have the data and you're in some geologic environments that, like in Oklahoma, there's definitely hydrothermal dolomites that
1:51:52 have been well documented. I think there's plenty more. And I think you can argue if you actually got the detailed data that some of these black chemical muds are not detrital and something that's
1:52:06 been floating around for 100 million years and then somehow gets subducted when there's no geologic process that shows the whole basin sunk 12, 000 feet. So it cooked and then it sprung back to
1:52:18 where it is today. That whole thing is, you know, it's questionable for sure to say it at least. And so to approach these things from a hydrothermal. Geologic perspective, I think, you know,
1:52:31 for a conventional show that you're trying to do, I'm very unconventional in my geology, so that's kind of a weird thing to start this show off pretty. You're pretty uncouth.
1:52:42 Or maybe you nailed the head on the head, maybe you nailed the, you know, head on the head, but yeah, so going after something with the idea that it's a chemical problem and understand that,
1:52:58 chemical reaction better.
1:53:01 Yeah, there's, I think there's a lot of potential in that. Yeah,
1:53:06 yeah, it'll be interesting to see as we keep taking water samples. Did you have a water sample process for me a year or two ago? No. You never made it to the left? Never made it to the left. I
1:53:15 still haven't though. Yeah, he's still got it. Yeah, I don't know if you want to run a pH, it's probably changed a little bit, but the other things, as far as elemental makeup. The other
1:53:21 things ought to be the same? Oh yeah, especially.
1:53:25 I would too, yeah, you sent me that jar after you're on your real high API oil, wasn't it? It was like a - It's 46. Yeah. Same well. Same well, I was just talking about that. We're gonna run
1:53:35 the - Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, when I first got that, you were like, Man, I wanna watch how this reservoir changes. And I was, I didn't really understand, you know what you were talking about
1:53:48 or what you meant through any of that, but since you were a jar, anyways. Yes, you did. And I definitely still have it We gotta go get that processed. Yeah, ship it up to the lab, man. Yeah,
1:53:59 we'll follow up on that for sure. Yeah. Maybe a
1:54:03 show too, a year from now. What we gotta do is go find some oil and then it'll afford, you know, a store. Afford all these other things. So play with it and actually figure it out. Yeah.
1:54:14 'Cause, yeah, not there yet. Yeah
1:54:19 Yeah, I've
1:54:22 slowly getting there, right? I sold that load this morning, and I've got this well study making four barrels a day. She's my baby.
1:54:35 She's also like two miles from the house, so I can just run over there in mind to wear. There you go. I'm waiting on the River Commission for a couple of other wells in the area. They got orphaned
1:54:47 that are out of that same reservoir. Man. Nice. I spend a lot of time waiting on the River Commission. Yup Yup. That goes for the BLM. That goes for any state. You talk about mining in Arizona,
1:54:60 lithium in Utah, it doesn't matter. They all take their time at trying to understand what you're trying to do and how their decision making has an impact on it, which I get, but what I really
1:55:16 don't like is when you start getting the feeling that they're not, they're there to try to figure out, like, I can't Are you against this or what are we, like, are we not a team, you know, like,
1:55:27 it's one, it fires me up over all kinds of things. The other brother that was honorably discharged from the Air Force and, uh, and the doctors, you know, it's the same thing. You go to, to get,
1:55:38 uh, you know, your problem solved and someone's there making the decision and they're like, like they have the control of what you, you need because you're hurting and you're trying to get
1:55:49 something, same thing with the oil and gas or you're trying to permit something. They're like, well, I'm, I'm controlling. Like, no, we're both Americans. We're trying to make efficient
1:55:58 energy. We're trying to make critical minerals, right? We're trying, like we're trying to make wealth in the state. That's our intention. That's exactly why we're here and what we're doing. You
1:56:06 need to be helping us make this happen, not be a fricking problem. Yeah. Like how that psyche gets into some people that are at those and I hate to say it, but it's the bureaucracy. Yeah. It
1:56:19 like breeds this. I need to be in charge and what are you doing? And like, no, dude, like we need to work together and solve this problem. Yeah. That is big deal right now in the country. Well,
1:56:33 then we've got this big orphan well problem. Yeah. But it takes eight months to get an orphan well in state Texas. To take ownership of it? Oh, godly. What in the world? Anywhere between yes,
1:56:47 six and eight months is pretty reasonable Key, what in the world? You got to prove that you have a lease. They have to give notice to the previous owner. If you have a single signature P4. And
1:56:60 then they have
1:57:03 to be able to refute it or contest it. It's just such a slow process to take over wells that are abandoned right now. That are a massive problem for them, right? They have like a billion dollar
1:57:16 budget to plug these things at some point and you got someone who's like, I'll take it Yeah.
1:57:22 And that stuff that's like printing money in 15 days like you kick it over. Yeah, so what I'm talking about better Anyway, so I'm waiting on a couple of wells that process. It's just a long long
1:57:33 process. Yeah, and uh, but
1:57:37 Yeah, so we'll be making some oil. We'll be making some more oil here soon
1:57:44 Yeah, and you're letting a new one nice and hell yeah, we'll have Troy out there come out Catching cuttings making sure we're doing everything. We're not
1:57:56 That's definitely silt
1:57:60 Yeah, yeah, cool. Well, thanks for coming on Troy. Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. Good luck with everything you got going on I can't wait to hear the uh the shows man what you pull out of
1:58:08 all these people and Capture in the experience dude like you're after the same thing a lot of I feel like a lot of us are in this industry in our age Like we're we really want to make a difference.
1:58:18 We want to make it profitable Yeah. I wanna make it safe and let's learn from each other and let's get after it. So, get some good people on this show, man, let's do it. Yeah, if they'll come
1:58:28 on, it seems like those old guys, they'll talk to you at the coffee shop, but they won't talk to you behind a mic. Right, yeah, you gotta be real persistent. We'll figure it out. Yeah, you
1:58:35 will. Look at
1:58:37 that. He will leave that up to you. Cool, man. Awesome. Well, thanks, Troy. Good to see you. Likewise. Thanks for the learning. Well, I don't know about that, man The Dolomite. I'm
1:58:49 making a living out of learning. Yeah, it's cool. Well, we'll see you down the road. Cheers.
1:58:58 Cheers, 150 a while. Yeah. Got a 14727 record high. Records are just meant to be broke.