Most people don't understand that any kind of a well is a lot more complicated than just a hole in the ground. Thank You for trying to help educate people. Best Wishes to You and Your Family Zach.
@@TheZachLife love the channel bro been following for years have a ? Do You think it’s still profitable for a company to drill a new well in your area and have good production or just second recovery
Im a refinery man in Australia so these wells u guys have r new learning for me do u drill into pools of oil or is it all sitting in oilsands and cracks?
@@cammos This whole discussion is too complicated to answer in a TH-cam comment section. A simple truthful answer to your question is yes, all of the places you mentioned. Use a search engine and teach yourself.
I'm an owner/operator here in WV, that was the most concise and easy to understand explanation of borehole dynamics that I've seen on TH-cam. Your videos go along to way toward building trust and understanding with folks that might otherwise demonize our industry,
And these are the most basic wells. If you really want your mind blown look into directional drilling, extra long reach wells, gas lift, downhole pumps and miscible injection.
In the Old days they were Flag gauges that needed a pre-selected pressure to support the flag,Red,Yellow,Green in the Horizontal position,when pressure drops the Flag drops to a 45 degree and if drops more it will be Vertical And Can be seen by long range binoculars!!! Times change Yet Old ways still work!!! 45 years ago things were different before I became a truck Driver,ALL I Remember that worked the fields are long gone but not forgotten!!!❤
I worked on many gas turbine driven water flood units for injection wells (2nd stage recovery and beyond) both offshore and in the oil patches of 11 western states! These videos are fascinating to me... Thanks much for taking the time to do 'em!
I previously worked at a W-A-G CO2 injection asset that had Solar Turbines on the split case pumps for the water injection side of the system. Pretty neat.
You may explain that the water you are injecting is the water that came out of the oil production wells. So in effect you are just putting it back into an oil production zone.
Hey Zach from Calgary, Canada. Just wanted to thank you (again) for the education (on water injection this time). I always look forward to yor vids because I get the knowledge of many generations in plain english from a guy who doesn't act like a know it all and is never afraid to admit he doesn't know everything and you have dirty hands so I know that you always speak from your own experience. Plus I get a good laugh from all your T-shirts. Cheers Zach and all the best from a northern neighbor.
Hey Zack. I’ve been a big fan for a while. I’m from Shackelford county, and have admired the oil operators that I’ve wirelined for for years. Many are dying off and not many of these oil men I know are our age. I’ve kicked around the idea of operating my own stuff for a while and really find your content worth more than gold. For now I run a wireline truck for Flying A out of Abilene. If you ever need wireline services give me a shout. I’d love to pick your brain as well. Keep up the great work, your content is truly one of a kind!
Excellent video Zach! I’ve been working in the OH, WV, PA Gasfield for 10yrs now. I haul Condensate off the Wells now. I started out as a Trash Man switching Roll-Off Boxes on Drilling and Fracking Sites 10yrs ago! Then I hauled Drill Cuttings, Water, and Finally got my Hazmat and enjoy the Tanker Life! Around here Driver’s make more than the Mechanics. Otherwise I’d be wrenching. Keep posting awesome informative videos! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🛢️🛢️🛢️🛢️💰💰💰💰
Excellent Job!! You handled a pretty complicated situation (injection well components) and explained how each part fits in the scheme. I learned a lot of new stuff about injection wells. I understand hydraulics so that helped. Love the safety layers built into the system!!
Hey Zachlife, thank you for explaining injection wells, you did a great job ! This is a tough subject to educate the public on, but you did good ! Thank you.
Really interesting. Really like the explanation of the layers of everything underground and how you might be looking for a spot just a few feet thick. Cool stuff. Thanks.
There are several instances where I live of flow migration from one well to another. Especially when hundreds to thousands of wells from the early 1900's being drilled then abandonded when they played out. Several farms that had good water were definitely contaminated by fracking. It may not happen a lot where you live but in Pennsylvania it happens quite often.
Unlikely. They weren't fracking wells in the early 1900s for one thing. For another, the horsepower doesn't exist for fractures to propagate for miles uphole from the target formation. For another, the Indians up there used to put wool and skins in the creeks because oil would naturally migrate up the faults and into the creek water and they would collect it for medicinal purposes. Oil has been in the groundwater there for about 100 times longer than humanity has existed. The water in pennsylvania has never been free of oil for the entire history of humanity.
@@timthetiny7538 No there weren't fracking them they were blasting them with nitro. We had a well on my relatives farm and another uncle had three on his farm. My point was the new wells fracked today can and do migrate pressure to old conventional wells. They also definitely do migrate from one frac to another. Just ask the people in Washington and Westmoreland Counties. Someone i know works the fracs, hauls the water and does the mud jobs. So I disagree with your opinion.
Flow migration through a formation is how oil wells work but migration from a lower to higher formation is what's uncommon. Likely the problem you describe is not from a frac job but from an injection well that has a high than designed formation pressure/injection volume. Content in next video.
Great video. When you look at the depth of an earthquake and then you look at the depth of the wells you quickly realize how stupid the argument is that they're in any way tied together. My understanding is you often have oil fields in areas that are geologically active. So yes you have earthquakes near oil wells. Probably the best injection well video I've seen on youtube.
I was thinking about that too. If we consider that earthquake epicentres are generally measured at several miles deep, and then these well barely touch a couple of thousand feet, it's a bit like blaming a guy two miles away for rattling your windows with his loud stereo, even though you could never even hear it, much less feels it. If that makes any sense?
I do find this fascinating and brilliantly explained by you,, I do find myself amazed that somehow somewhere back in time, people somehow figured this stuff out, and the huge advances across the world because of oil and the internal combustion engine,, 👏👏🇮🇪
There were 31,000 wells drilled in the East Texas field. A lot of wells had no plugs over the woodbine P&A. The Wilcox formation is a treatable fresh water zone and there wasn't enough surface pipe run in the 1930s. Injection causes bottom hole pressure. Age deteriorates steel casing. The freshwater wells have H2s in the water now. As for Gunsight wells. Cable tool wells made leases look like pin cushions. I drilled a few wells with rotary in the early 80s with intentions of injection. Water started coming up all over the lease. Freshwater contamination is starting to be a big problem. You're in an isolated area and don't have to deal with it. The fresh water sand on your log reminds me of the Trinity water sand. We used to get makeup water from the Trinity water sand for water flooding. Wish you well on the casing leak. It is ruff trying to get 50 to 60 year old injection wells to pass. Especially where the pipe runs through shallow Coal or wet shale.
Everything makes a lot more sense when explained. That wall of rock is as solid as the rock of gibraltar. I would not want salt on the surface of my property and I do not even have a lawn. I live on a gravel pit place of ground, and also every piece of ground near me is muskeg. Eighty acres of gravel in the middle of muskeg. Land here has value if you can build on it, and since muskeg is just another word for vegetation floating on water... its a serious thing. Now not all of this valley is muskeg, far be it for its the garden center of alaska here in wasilla. I do know tho since this weather has changed so much, its a lot colder, a lot more rain and winter is as cold as a mother in laws kiss. Waiting for the next one Zach
Zach, that was a great video and explanation. Is an electrician I like your channel for the electrical side of things but watch all your videos as I find the wells interesting. Your knowledge across wells, geology, mechanics and electrical/electronic is superb. When I seen you with the pencil and paper I thought this will be good and you didn’t disappoint. If I didn’t stay on the other side of the world I’d enjoy a few pints with ya. All the best to you.
This is a great video for giving an overview of how injection and production wells are constructed and operate on a fundamental level. What I will say, is that O&G injection and production wells *can* cause seismic activity - but it's usually wells that are *significantly* deeper than the ones you're operating, and usually with much higher production/injection rates (ie. tens of thousands of bbl/day).
I ran a search around the Nevada nuclear testing area. Hundreds of atomic bomb tests registered lower on the earthquake scale than the larger earthquakes in Texas.
Thanks for the video, been a while since I've operated and sure makes me miss it. I operated heavy oil water flood, as well as ASP heavy oil flood and did well servicing for a long time, thinking its time to go back. Id love to but and operate my own wells, but seems like a lot more red tape to do so in Canada
Nice overview... Now you need to upgrade those annulus gauges to Wi-Fi versions, set up a meshtastic long range radio communication network, tie in your MQQT broker and send that pressure reading directly to your desktop... No more driving out to the site in the summer heat 😂... Looking forward to more scada stuff..
I was working down in Long Beach Harbor near the oil refineries, and there was a bank of 5 or 6 HUGE Waukesha natural gas powered V-16 engines running ... I asked someone what they were for, as they were obviously not generating electricity, and he said "they're pumping sea water into the ground to push oil toward the well pumps, and to keep sink holes from forming due to the oil being taken out." I never knew such a thing existed... fascinating.
Back in the day when I was running frac pumps,when in the dinosaur in Utah I would set max pressure kickout at 5,000 pounds but would kick pump off before reaching that so you didn't have to reset,but when pressure starts dropping back in gear and going to full throttle and banging gears and you are blowing and going in 10 seconds and I would be rocking until the equipment was flushed. Rig down and off to the next one.
I built 2 disposal wells in Montana for a guy, one was a 3500 bpd the other was a 7000 bpd and both ran between 1500 and 2500 psi we had to run fiberglass pipe due to the high pressures. The only problem either well had as far as any environmental issue was the operating managers wouldn't keep a close eye on the tank levels during a flow back and would overflow the tanks onto the ground and of course it was all oil that ended up on the ground every time. You'd think that they'd learn their lesson after the 1st time but i lost count on how many cleanups i had to do.
As we have a salt water injection well on our property in Oklahoma, I knew in general how they worked. But this is a great video about the details. The well on our property has not given any trouble except for a couple of above ground leaks. However, in the field that these oil wells are in, there have been cases of groundwater systems getting salt water in them. This has happened a very few times over the last 50 years, so it is not related to today's politics. As the wells in the area of this field have had several different small operators, I am not sure how well they were monitored. The fresh water level around our area is 250 feet or so. I know this as the water well we had when I was young was similar to a small oil well it had a kind of pump jack, tubing, casing, and wooden rods(with metal ends) I helped my dad pull the well by hand to replace the one way valve a few times and we knew how deep it was by the number of rods and their length. It is my understanding that the oil producing depth is around the wells on our property is 4000 to 8000 feet down. One thing that you have not shown yet is the storage tanks for the salt water. The tanks on our property has a small dam around them to contain leaks. A much larger pond was also dug nearby. Possibly the next injection well video will discuss this. One last thing, as the oil field our property is in was discovered 90 years ago, there are areas where things will not grow due to salt water spills decades ago. And the area gets above 30 inches of rain per year. It is definitely a good thing for the environment to put the water back in the ground.
@@TheZachLife Yes, I know. I just re-watched parts of it. There is no dike around the tank as with the tanks on our property. The material the tanks looks the same as yours, non-metallic. They are larger than the one in your video. It would seem to be common sense to build a small dike around the tanks to contain leakage if it occurs. I do not know about the salt water and other waste that comes up with oil in your wells, but the waste that is generated in the field around our land is pretty nasty. It contains a lot of Hydrogen Sulfide, stinking to high heaven.
The disposal wells that are causing issues, are taking 10s of thousands of barrels a day of fluid, with the deep ones, down in the Ellenbuger, causing the earthquakes. This is due to the water lubricating the deep basement faults nearby. The RRC recently killed the deep disposal wells in the earquake action areas, which brought on shallow disposal wells. They are starting to have issues with that in the Permian, because of the volumes involved. Some of the old legacy verticals that have been plugged, are starting to fail from the significant increase in pore pressure. This isnt an issue you will find up here though, no one is moving the insane volumes of water up here.
I really liked this video! Please do more of the oil drilling and maintenance and explain why and what it is for like in this video. Did you not buy a drill rig? Keep it up!
Thanks for the video. It was very informative and I understand more about how injection wells work. However as someone who lives in Oklahoma and went through that period of time when we were having more earthquakes than California, I do have to disagres with you on the point that injection wells can't cause earthquakes. After the Oklahoma Corporation Commission started shutting down injection wells in the areas that earthquakes were occurring, the earthquake problem went away. That does not mean I think all injections wells are bad. However it seems to me there are some areas that are more geologically sensitive than others when it comes to injecting fluids back into the ground.
Never once has he seen communication between zones. To me that is very interesting that absolutely no fluid moves through the shale of a few feet thick for miles. Seems like it would because one would think it is jumbled up underground but it certainly IS NOT. What this means to me is the reason for the oil in the first place. Any kind of leak between zones means that in geological time, or millions of years it would have all leaked out and made a Labrea tar pit on the surface. Because if you let oil communicate it moves up to the surface and over geological time would certainly turn into tar since all the volatiles in it would seep out. I have heard of this in California or in the middle east having oil seeps. Ancient peoples used this stuff for boats and other things. We use cubic kilometers of oil every year worldwide, and a cubic kilometer is a whole bunch of oil.
It's not that there's no communication - it's just that it's basically imperceivable to us on our time horizon as humans. Oil and gas *does* diffuse through shale... it's just an insanely slow process due the fact that most shales have a permeability in the nano-darcy range... ie. you'll have to wait tens of thousands to hundreds of thousand years to notice any appreciable movement. In comparison, most oil/gas sands have permeability in the darcy or millidarcy range... In layman's terms, permeability is the ability of a fluid to flow through a porous medium (like a sandstone rock formation). If you took something like a clean sand you might have a permeability of say 1 darcy... so for nanodarcy you're literally talking 1,000,000,000 less permeable (or that many times more resistant to flow). This is pretty much why we consider shales (and similar) to be impermeable.
I've never thought to blame the well it's self. You inject water underpressure to displace the oil trapped in the sands . I believe that act of displacement is what causes the issues elsewhere.
yeah thats all fine for you in a low pressure area you work in,but there have been disasters in fracking deep high pressure gas wells,and in western australia they tried to frack a gas well with 3 million litres of diesel oil and only managed to recover 1 million litres and that plume is now polluting a national park
in the 1950´s my Great Grandmas Uncle had injection wells in his pasture with his horses, the hose leaked and the horse drank the water and died. He was into harness racings, when oil was struck back then, they would get into harness racing. Even build race tracks in the middle of the oilfield....big money.
do you have any tips for finding a 2000' deep well in Pennsylvania drilled circa 1920? USGS resource reports reference it and some 1970s underground coal mine maps show a well that can't be accounted for by water wells on the property but its not precise in its location. Historical imagery imagery (aircraft) shows nothing remarkable in the 40's where the map shows. I suspect it was cut off below plowing depth sometime around then.
I was still confused on why you would use this so I looked them up. They inject saltwater into the ground for the purpose of "enhanced oil recovery from the reservoir". There are also Disposal Wells used to dispose of unwanted saltwater according to the RRC of Texas.
Man checkin in from alberta and you boys in txs are living in the wild west. I have seen shit like that in saskatchewan but alot of that old iron is being cleaned up.
No idea how this video popped up for me; extremely informative - never knew how that all worked. Leave geology and seismology to the scientists, though.
Your video was a delightful surprise! I wasn't expecting to be so captivated by the content, but you managed to keep me engaged from start to finish. Your genuine and relatable approach makes the video so enjoyable to watch. I appreciate how you tackled the topic with a fresh perspective, shedding new light on familiar concepts. You've gained a new subscriber, and I'm excited to explore more of your content!
He mentioned and explained lot of times. This is a waste water separated from the raw oil lifted from the ground. Putting the water back into ground is the easiest to get rid of it and to likely maintain some pressure in the formations too.
Grew up around a field that was developed in the boom of the teens or twenties. Across the road was an area they were flooding the perimeter to push oil to the center of the field. I say this because I don’t buy into the scare of water injection. It’s been done for years. I’d be curious to hear when your injection well was developed. In the 70’s when a few wells were developed they needed someplace to go with the water. My grandad, knowing the area well, took the producer to one of those old wells from the teens that played out and was capped leaving the casing in the hole. The well was revitalized for disposal and is still functional today… Was the chart the end result of “pinging” a well?
My previous oil co will not give me a release I ask the land man every year the well has been plugged and not offered a shut in lease why is that thanks Zack
The most recent development is of CO2 injection. Besides water disposal, steam and polymer injection have also been used. I’d suppose you’d have to venture to somewhere like the Osage, Bakersfield or Permian to see co2 in action…
Very good explanation! While I agree that your shallow wells are not making earthquakes, it has been proven in Oklahoma that the Arbuckle disposal wells have caused earthquakes. Since limiting the rates of disposal, the earthquakes have been rare if any. Lived here since I was born a half a century ago, never had any earthquakes that I remember until the big push of drilling in 2006. That said we experienced a lot of them between 2009 and 2016, some pretty big and caused damage to buildings and houses. Some of the wells in our area took on massive amounts of saltwater, and had to be disposed of. I am not a communist environmentalist, I support drilling and fracking. Just an observation from a guy in Oklahoma. Keep up the good work Mr Zack. Drill baby drill!
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Most people don't understand that any kind of a well is a lot more complicated than just a hole in the ground.
Thank You for trying to help educate people.
Best Wishes to You and Your Family Zach.
Thanks.
@@TheZachLife love the channel bro been following for years have a ? Do
You think it’s still profitable for a company to drill a new well in your area and have good production or just second recovery
Im a refinery man in Australia so these wells u guys have r new learning for me do u drill into pools of oil or is it all sitting in oilsands and cracks?
@@cammos
This whole discussion is too complicated to answer in a TH-cam comment section. A simple truthful answer to your question is yes, all of the places you mentioned.
Use a search engine and teach yourself.
Love how you simplify it, I used to work offshore welding, and people don't understand the precautions they take nowadays.
I'm an owner/operator here in WV, that was the most concise and easy to understand explanation of borehole dynamics that I've seen on TH-cam. Your videos go along to way toward building trust and understanding with folks that might otherwise demonize our industry,
Amen. 🙏🏻
Our industry is under fire for sure.
I’m a union WV pipeline welder and have been trying to survive this downturn.
Fascinating. There's way more to oil wells than I had imagined. Such an underrated channel!
Ya it really is kickass channel. Glad I stumbled upon it. Zach is definitely a handy fella
Thanks.
Very good explanation of a well. I was in the oil field for 50 years.
THANK YOU
I didn't realize that oil wells were so complicated! Thanks for the great explanation, Zach.
And these are the most basic wells. If you really want your mind blown look into directional drilling, extra long reach wells, gas lift, downhole pumps and miscible injection.
Yep. Then remember that a gallon of gas costs less than a gallon of milk.
@@desertriderukverun1002 Gaslift had to be 90% of the wells In operating over my 50 years in the business
In the Old days they were Flag gauges that needed a pre-selected pressure to support the flag,Red,Yellow,Green in the Horizontal position,when pressure drops the Flag drops to a 45 degree and if drops more it will be Vertical And
Can be seen by long range binoculars!!!
Times change Yet Old ways still work!!!
45 years ago things were different before I became a truck Driver,ALL I
Remember that worked the fields are long gone but not forgotten!!!❤
Greetings, Zach! All the way from the east Texas oil fields of Kilgore
I worked on many gas turbine driven water flood units for injection wells (2nd stage recovery and beyond) both offshore and in the oil patches of 11 western states! These videos are fascinating to me... Thanks much for taking the time to do 'em!
I previously worked at a W-A-G CO2 injection asset that had Solar Turbines on the split case pumps for the water injection side of the system. Pretty neat.
Best oil field production channel in my humble opinion
Thanks.
You may explain that the water you are injecting is the water that came out of the oil production wells. So in effect you are just putting it back into an oil production zone.
Hey Zach from Calgary, Canada. Just wanted to thank you (again) for the education (on water injection this time). I always look forward to yor vids because I get the knowledge of many generations in plain english from a guy who doesn't act like a know it all and is never afraid to admit he doesn't know everything and you have dirty hands so I know that you always speak from your own experience. Plus I get a good laugh from all your T-shirts. Cheers Zach and all the best from a northern neighbor.
Hey Zack. I’ve been a big fan for a while. I’m from Shackelford county, and have admired the oil operators that I’ve wirelined for for years. Many are dying off and not many of these oil men I know are our age. I’ve kicked around the idea of operating my own stuff for a while and really find your content worth more than gold. For now I run a wireline truck for Flying A out of Abilene. If you ever need wireline services give me a shout. I’d love to pick your brain as well. Keep up the great work, your content is truly one of a kind!
Thanks. Are you cased? Or open hole logging?
@@TheZachLife we do cased, CBL, gamma logs, back off, cutting, plugging, perf and all that stuff. Basically all cased services with e-line.
@@DillonFreasierB 10-4
got a cousin who had a service company in abilene. did rat hole drilling
You are the king of vehicle maintenance if you are still running a ford 5.4 3v in 2024....
Excellent video Zach!
I’ve been working in the OH, WV, PA Gasfield for 10yrs now.
I haul Condensate off the Wells now.
I started out as a Trash Man switching Roll-Off Boxes on Drilling and Fracking Sites 10yrs ago!
Then I hauled Drill Cuttings, Water, and Finally got my Hazmat and enjoy the Tanker Life!
Around here Driver’s make more than the Mechanics.
Otherwise I’d be wrenching.
Keep posting awesome informative videos!
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🛢️🛢️🛢️🛢️💰💰💰💰
Worked on swd (salt water disposal) wells in iraq and north Africa, the highest we went with pressure is almost 5000 psi. Great vid 👌
Excellent Job!! You handled a pretty complicated situation (injection well components) and explained how each part fits in the scheme. I learned a lot of new stuff about injection wells. I understand hydraulics so that helped. Love the safety layers built into the system!!
Hey Zachlife, thank you for explaining injection wells, you did a great job ! This is a tough subject to educate the public on, but you did good ! Thank you.
Zack back 20 years ago I worked for a small company that pimped us out to Schlumberger. Been on some fracking jobs with 10 or more units screaming. 😊
Very well done! you explained things in a concise, simple way. Thank you for bringing us into TheZachLife, it is quite a ride
Never knew it was this complicated. Thanks for explaining.
Really interesting. Really like the explanation of the layers of everything underground and how you might be looking for a spot just a few feet thick. Cool stuff. Thanks.
Oh by the way it is fun listening to a layman talking about a well, your good I enjoy hearing you
There are several instances where I live of flow migration from one well to another. Especially when hundreds to thousands of wells from the early 1900's being drilled then abandonded when they played out. Several farms that had good water were definitely contaminated by fracking. It may not happen a lot where you live but in Pennsylvania it happens quite often.
Unlikely.
They weren't fracking wells in the early 1900s for one thing.
For another, the horsepower doesn't exist for fractures to propagate for miles uphole from the target formation.
For another, the Indians up there used to put wool and skins in the creeks because oil would naturally migrate up the faults and into the creek water and they would collect it for medicinal purposes.
Oil has been in the groundwater there for about 100 times longer than humanity has existed. The water in pennsylvania has never been free of oil for the entire history of humanity.
@@timthetiny7538 No there weren't fracking them they were blasting them with nitro. We had a well on my relatives farm and another uncle had three on his farm. My point was the new wells fracked today can and do migrate pressure to old conventional wells. They also definitely do migrate from one frac to another. Just ask the people in Washington and Westmoreland Counties. Someone i know works the fracs, hauls the water and does the mud jobs. So I disagree with your opinion.
@needsaride15126 yeah you know someone who hauls water.
I frac wells. My opinion outranks his. And yours.
Flow migration through a formation is how oil wells work but migration from a lower to higher formation is what's uncommon. Likely the problem you describe is not from a frac job but from an injection well that has a high than designed formation pressure/injection volume. Content in next video.
Great video. When you look at the depth of an earthquake and then you look at the depth of the wells you quickly realize how stupid the argument is that they're in any way tied together. My understanding is you often have oil fields in areas that are geologically active. So yes you have earthquakes near oil wells. Probably the best injection well video I've seen on youtube.
I was thinking about that too. If we consider that earthquake epicentres are generally measured at several miles deep, and then these well barely touch a couple of thousand feet, it's a bit like blaming a guy two miles away for rattling your windows with his loud stereo, even though you could never even hear it, much less feels it. If that makes any sense?
Thanks.
Disposal wells can most definitely interact with deep basement faults, below the Ellenburger
well there is that one spot in Oklahoma that earthquakes and fracking are all in the same spot....
Montana, and Wyoming close to Yellowstone perhaps?? 🤔
I do find this fascinating and brilliantly explained by you,, I do find myself amazed that somehow somewhere back in time, people somehow figured this stuff out, and the huge advances across the world because of oil and the internal combustion engine,, 👏👏🇮🇪
Thank you for your explanation of everything Zach. I just got a little bit smarter about stuff.😊
Excellent presentation, Thank you. This one was especially good.
There were 31,000 wells drilled in the East Texas field. A lot of wells had no plugs over the woodbine P&A. The Wilcox formation is a treatable fresh water zone and there wasn't enough surface pipe run in the 1930s.
Injection causes bottom hole pressure. Age deteriorates steel casing. The freshwater wells have H2s in the water now.
As for Gunsight wells. Cable tool wells made leases look like pin cushions. I drilled a few wells with rotary in the early 80s with intentions of injection. Water started coming up all over the lease.
Freshwater contamination is starting to be a big problem. You're in an isolated area and don't have to deal with it.
The fresh water sand on your log reminds me of the Trinity water sand. We used to get makeup water from the Trinity water sand for water flooding.
Wish you well on the casing leak. It is ruff trying to get 50 to 60 year old injection wells to pass. Especially where the pipe runs through shallow Coal or wet shale.
i love this channel keep the oil rolling
Everything makes a lot more sense when explained. That wall of rock is as solid as the rock of gibraltar. I would not want salt on the surface of my property and I do not even have a lawn. I live on a gravel pit place of ground, and also every piece of ground near me is muskeg. Eighty acres of gravel in the middle of muskeg. Land here has value if you can build on it, and since muskeg is just another word for vegetation floating on water... its a serious thing. Now not all of this valley is muskeg, far be it for its the garden center of alaska here in wasilla. I do know tho since this weather has changed so much, its a lot colder, a lot more rain and winter is as cold as a mother in laws kiss. Waiting for the next one Zach
Awesome shirt for the video topic. Greetings from RI.
Really interesting. Love this kind of content
Thanks
Thanks Zach for explaining it to us !!
At first, I thought those were Daleks on your shirt!
Oh well, still a funny shirt...lol
Oh yeah, cool tech video. 😎
Zach, that was a great video and explanation. Is an electrician I like your channel for the electrical side of things but watch all your videos as I find the wells interesting. Your knowledge across wells, geology, mechanics and electrical/electronic is superb. When I seen you with the pencil and paper I thought this will be good and you didn’t disappoint. If I didn’t stay on the other side of the world I’d enjoy a few pints with ya. All the best to you.
Fascinating. Thanks for explaining in such detail. Especially the annulus. ❤❤❤
Thanks for sharing your knowledge in an easy to understand format.
Thank you for teaching us your trade.
Thannks Zach, very informative!
Excellent video!
This is a great video for giving an overview of how injection and production wells are constructed and operate on a fundamental level.
What I will say, is that O&G injection and production wells *can* cause seismic activity - but it's usually wells that are *significantly* deeper than the ones you're operating, and usually with much higher production/injection rates (ie. tens of thousands of bbl/day).
I ran a search around the Nevada nuclear testing area. Hundreds of atomic bomb tests registered lower on the earthquake scale than the larger earthquakes in Texas.
Thanks for the video, been a while since I've operated and sure makes me miss it. I operated heavy oil water flood, as well as ASP heavy oil flood and did well servicing for a long time, thinking its time to go back.
Id love to but and operate my own wells, but seems like a lot more red tape to do so in Canada
Nice overview...
Now you need to upgrade those annulus gauges to Wi-Fi versions, set up a meshtastic long range radio communication network, tie in your MQQT broker and send that pressure reading directly to your desktop... No more driving out to the site in the summer heat 😂...
Looking forward to more scada stuff..
Hahaha thanks.
Not only informative, but your presentation makes it very interesting.
Thanks.
I was working down in Long Beach Harbor near the oil refineries, and there was a bank of 5 or 6 HUGE Waukesha natural gas powered V-16 engines running ... I asked someone what they were for, as they were obviously not generating electricity, and he said "they're pumping sea water into the ground to push oil toward the well pumps, and to keep sink holes from forming due to the oil being taken out." I never knew such a thing existed... fascinating.
Back in the day when I was running frac pumps,when in the dinosaur in Utah I would set max pressure kickout at 5,000 pounds but would kick pump off before reaching that so you didn't have to reset,but when pressure starts dropping back in gear and going to full throttle and banging gears and you are blowing and going in 10 seconds and I would be rocking until the equipment was flushed. Rig down and off to the next one.
quite interesting. i think i got most of that. thank you
I built 2 disposal wells in Montana for a guy, one was a 3500 bpd the other was a 7000 bpd and both ran between 1500 and 2500 psi we had to run fiberglass pipe due to the high pressures. The only problem either well had as far as any environmental issue was the operating managers wouldn't keep a close eye on the tank levels during a flow back and would overflow the tanks onto the ground and of course it was all oil that ended up on the ground every time. You'd think that they'd learn their lesson after the 1st time but i lost count on how many cleanups i had to do.
Another great video Zach, you make a great teacher.
Really interesting. Thanks.
Another informative video. Thank you, Zach!
Excellent video Zach!
Thanks for the knowledge brother. Cheers mate👍
As we have a salt water injection well on our property in Oklahoma, I knew in general how they worked. But this is a great video about the details. The well on our property has not given any trouble except for a couple of above ground leaks. However, in the field that these oil wells are in, there have been cases of groundwater systems getting salt water in them. This has happened a very few times over the last 50 years, so it is not related to today's politics. As the wells in the area of this field have had several different small operators, I am not sure how well they were monitored. The fresh water level around our area is 250 feet or so. I know this as the water well we had when I was young was similar to a small oil well it had a kind of pump jack, tubing, casing, and wooden rods(with metal ends) I helped my dad pull the well by hand to replace the one way valve a few times and we knew how deep it was by the number of rods and their length. It is my understanding that the oil producing depth is around the wells on our property is 4000 to 8000 feet down. One thing that you have not shown yet is the storage tanks for the salt water. The tanks on our property has a small dam around them to contain leaks. A much larger pond was also dug nearby. Possibly the next injection well video will discuss this. One last thing, as the oil field our property is in was discovered 90 years ago, there are areas where things will not grow due to salt water spills decades ago. And the area gets above 30 inches of rain per year. It is definitely a good thing for the environment to put the water back in the ground.
I did a video a few weeks ago talking about the injection system on the new lease that had the water tank in it. Thanks.
@@TheZachLife Yes, I know. I just re-watched parts of it. There is no dike around the tank as with the tanks on our property. The material the tanks looks the same as yours, non-metallic. They are larger than the one in your video. It would seem to be common sense to build a small dike around the tanks to contain leakage if it occurs. I do not know about the salt water and other waste that comes up with oil in your wells, but the waste that is generated in the field around our land is pretty nasty. It contains a lot of Hydrogen Sulfide, stinking to high heaven.
The disposal wells that are causing issues, are taking 10s of thousands of barrels a day of fluid, with the deep ones, down in the Ellenbuger, causing the earthquakes. This is due to the water lubricating the deep basement faults nearby.
The RRC recently killed the deep disposal wells in the earquake action areas, which brought on shallow disposal wells. They are starting to have issues with that in the Permian, because of the volumes involved. Some of the old legacy verticals that have been plugged, are starting to fail from the significant increase in pore pressure.
This isnt an issue you will find up here though, no one is moving the insane volumes of water up here.
This pretty much sums it up; both O&G production and injection wells affect sub-surface stress regimes, and therefore fault activation/s.
Very interesting content. Thanks
Thanks.
Thanks Zach
I really liked this video!
Please do more of the oil drilling and maintenance and explain why and what it is for like in this video. Did you not buy a drill rig? Keep it up!
Thank you. Good explanation.
Good clear explanation of a well.
Thanks for the video. It was very informative and I understand more about how injection wells work.
However as someone who lives in Oklahoma and went through that period of time when we were having more earthquakes than California,
I do have to disagres with you on the point that injection wells can't cause earthquakes.
After the Oklahoma Corporation Commission started shutting down injection wells in the areas that earthquakes were occurring, the earthquake problem went away.
That does not mean I think all injections wells are bad. However it seems to me there are some areas that are more geologically sensitive than others when it comes to injecting
fluids back into the ground.
Very interesting!
I heard this phrase a few times in this video: "If you've got a good operator"
And if you don't...
Never once has he seen communication between zones. To me that is very interesting that absolutely no fluid moves through the shale of a few feet thick for miles. Seems like it would because one would think it is jumbled up underground but it certainly IS NOT. What this means to me is the reason for the oil in the first place. Any kind of leak between zones means that in geological time, or millions of years it would have all leaked out and made a Labrea tar pit on the surface. Because if you let oil communicate it moves up to the surface and over geological time would certainly turn into tar since all the volatiles in it would seep out. I have heard of this in California or in the middle east having oil seeps. Ancient peoples used this stuff for boats and other things. We use cubic kilometers of oil every year worldwide, and a cubic kilometer is a whole bunch of oil.
It's not that there's no communication - it's just that it's basically imperceivable to us on our time horizon as humans. Oil and gas *does* diffuse through shale... it's just an insanely slow process due the fact that most shales have a permeability in the nano-darcy range... ie. you'll have to wait tens of thousands to hundreds of thousand years to notice any appreciable movement. In comparison, most oil/gas sands have permeability in the darcy or millidarcy range...
In layman's terms, permeability is the ability of a fluid to flow through a porous medium (like a sandstone rock formation). If you took something like a clean sand you might have a permeability of say 1 darcy... so for nanodarcy you're literally talking 1,000,000,000 less permeable (or that many times more resistant to flow). This is pretty much why we consider shales (and similar) to be impermeable.
Enjoy your content.
Love the shirt. Hahahahaha.
Just passing through, Kansas oilfield checking in!
Really interesting, thanks.
We're all riding the tectonic plates baby 🐥 ! 😎
🔥🔥🤘🤘
I've never thought to blame the well it's self. You inject water underpressure to displace the oil trapped in the sands . I believe that act of displacement is what causes the issues elsewhere.
yeah thats all fine for you in a low pressure area you work in,but there have been disasters in fracking deep high pressure gas wells,and in western australia they tried to frack a gas well with 3 million litres of diesel oil and only managed to recover 1 million litres and that plume is now polluting a national park
in the 1950´s my Great Grandmas Uncle had injection wells in his pasture with his horses, the hose leaked and the horse drank the water and died. He was into harness racings, when oil was struck back then, they would get into harness racing. Even build race tracks in the middle of the oilfield....big money.
This can be a problem. Live stock seems to be attracted to oil and water for some reason.
do you have any tips for finding a 2000' deep well in Pennsylvania drilled circa 1920? USGS resource reports reference it and some 1970s underground coal mine maps show a well that can't be accounted for by water wells on the property but its not precise in its location. Historical imagery imagery (aircraft) shows nothing remarkable in the 40's where the map shows. I suspect it was cut off below plowing depth sometime around then.
How do you clear out the cement from the bottom each time you plug
yea man / Oil field 101 ,,, great
I was still confused on why you would use this so I looked them up. They inject saltwater into the ground for the purpose of "enhanced oil recovery from the reservoir". There are also Disposal Wells used to dispose of unwanted saltwater according to the RRC of Texas.
Man checkin in from alberta and you boys in txs are living in the wild west. I have seen shit like that in saskatchewan but alot of that old iron is being cleaned up.
If by the wild west you mean leading the world lol.
No idea how this video popped up for me; extremely informative - never knew how that all worked. Leave geology and seismology to the scientists, though.
Your video was a delightful surprise! I wasn't expecting to be so captivated by the content, but you managed to keep me engaged from start to finish. Your genuine and relatable approach makes the video so enjoyable to watch. I appreciate how you tackled the topic with a fresh perspective, shedding new light on familiar concepts. You've gained a new subscriber, and I'm excited to explore more of your content!
Awesome. Thanks.
Sup zach. Hope all is still rockin and rollin. Cheers buddy
Miniature Refinery electrical powered units can be imported into the USA
I have been on 42 years of drilling wells but don't know a hole bunch on the production side.
what if you used pressure transducers to shut down the well when pressure is detected it would protect from failures spreading
If you double the hole diameter does it double the production?
Howdy Zach
We frac 140 barrels per minute. An injection well at a couple hundred barrels a day is just a drop in the bucket
Hey Zach, I don't know if you've ever mentioned in any of your videos but what is the actual purpose of injecting water into the well?
He mentioned and explained lot of times. This is a waste water separated from the raw oil lifted from the ground. Putting the water back into ground is the easiest to get rid of it and to likely maintain some pressure in the formations too.
Grew up around a field that was developed in the boom of the teens or twenties. Across the road was an area they were flooding the perimeter to push oil to the center of the field. I say this because I don’t buy into the scare of water injection. It’s been done for years.
I’d be curious to hear when your injection well was developed. In the 70’s when a few wells were developed they needed someplace to go with the water. My grandad, knowing the area well, took the producer to one of those old wells from the teens that played out and was capped leaving the casing in the hole. The well was revitalized for disposal and is still functional today…
Was the chart the end result of “pinging” a well?
Intersting. Ive got a couple of wells from the 20's. This one was probably drilled in the 70's.
My previous oil co will not give me a release I ask the land man every year the well has been plugged and not offered a shut in lease why is that thanks Zack
How heavy is the salt water you produce?
Why not use stainless pipe so it wouldn't rust and fill the well above the packer with cement?
How do you know when your cement - oh scuse me - “CEment” is at the level you want? By calculating volume beforehand? Some kind of depth probe? Thx
Lol. There is a logging tool that can see where it is but it generally is just a column volume calculation.
"I don't care what they say" I'm sure you even have a t-shirt that says that 😉
Do they ever inject the water back into where the oil is to push or move more oil back out?
Yes absolutely.
The most recent development is of CO2 injection. Besides water disposal, steam and polymer injection have also been used. I’d suppose you’d have to venture to somewhere like the Osage, Bakersfield or Permian to see co2 in action…
Do you ever put together an investor group or financial partner and try and buy a lease or some leases?
not really Ive got a couple partners on a few things.
Currently tri frac’n with big red, I live in the area Zach needing a water well drilled
well go ask the folks in Barber Ks. county about salt water injection wells the wells ruined there drinking water
Very good explanation! While I agree that your shallow wells are not making earthquakes, it has been proven in Oklahoma that the Arbuckle disposal wells have caused earthquakes. Since limiting the rates of disposal, the earthquakes have been rare if any. Lived here since I was born a half a century ago, never had any earthquakes that I remember until the big push of drilling in 2006. That said we experienced a lot of them between 2009 and 2016, some pretty big and caused damage to buildings and houses. Some of the wells in our area took on massive amounts of saltwater, and had to be disposed of. I am not a communist environmentalist, I support drilling and fracking. Just an observation from a guy in Oklahoma. Keep up the good work Mr Zack. Drill baby drill!