Well, you always see these large contraptions,
structure that tapers at the top,
has some cross braces.
And I got to watch first hand this
happened about four miles away where they're putting this.
It's pretty far away, six kilometers.
But I was always driving past it on my way home from work
so you know you kind of look each day at the progress.
And big trucks, big giant things,
lots and lots of these pipe sections.
And as I learned about what they do,
they take the first pipe section and they have
a drilling head-- and these drilling heads are fascinating.
And this drill head as you rotate it,
the teeth grind into the rock and just the
weight of the pipes on top of this is enough to start drilling into the rock,
and breaking up the rock chips as you're drilling down into the ground.
Typical oil wells are on the order of one to two miles,
three kilometers deep is a typical depth of an oil well.
The deepest oil well in the United States is a full 33000 feet,
that's six miles down.
This is not stuff near the water table,
this is really far in where they expect to find
this porous rock that's been trapped that might have the oil in it.
Many people think that, "Aha!
The oil is in some underground pocket and if I
happened to poke the straw into the right part of the juice box,
right then I can just suck it up,
that's where the oil is or pump it up".
As if that there's a room like this one and
the oil well comes through the ceiling
this whole thing is just filled with one big tank of oil.
It's not how it is.
This sample here, this is a core sample,
this is the oil part,
this piece of limestone and you can see the brown color in it.
This is what an oil well looks like,
this is the part you're trying to hit-- this solid rock.
Not exactly solid rock,
slightly porous and the brown stuff you see in it,
this brown stuff is the oil.
If I drilled a hole through a formation of this,
all that oil that's trapped in those tiny little pores will pour
into this cavity I've now made by putting my drill into it.
Also by the way,
you can find out why these things are called fossil fuels.
If you look closely at this core sample,
you will see fossils,
you'll see little shells,
little pieces of these microscopic plants and animals and organisms from the sea.
Basically, the hard shells,
the bones they turn into fossils,
all the gooey parts turn into the oil.
So this is fossil fuels,
and in this formation,
this porous formation if I happened to hit it just right and put my drill there
oil will come out of the trapped rocks
into this cavity which I can then pump up to the top.
But first I have to make that cavity.
First, I have to drill down and get it.
So I'm drilling and rotating this metal teeth- tooth device grinding up rock chips.
And as I drill down,
say a section of 20 feet
I need to put another pipe on it because I need to keep turning it,
and that's what the oil derrick.
That's what this big rig is for because after one pipe section
drills down take another pipe section from the truck screw it on to this
and now start twisting this pipe section and you drill this and you
go section by section and occasionally you put in sleeves around it.
Right. So you can cap the sides of this. You don't get a cave in.
As you're drilling down,
the material that you're removing has to come out.
When you drill a mine like for coal,
well clearly you have those big carts of- of the stuff they're going to take the coal.
I'll take all the rock chips out, right.
You have some conveyor belt that's taking the stuff out.
How do you do this when you're drilling through a hole?
At the end, maybe the holes only,
only 10 centimeters across.
You start out it's half a meter across.
Right. You can start a very big hole and gradually get smaller and smaller and smaller.
How do you get all that material out when you're a thousand feet deep.
Somebody will say, "Oh well,
you squirt water down",
a rock doesn't float in the water.
Right? So no matter how much pressure I put down or going that deep into a hole,
that stuff is not going to come up.
The answer is mud.
Mud is the same density as rock but it's kind of gooey fluid.
So in the center of this whole,
I pumped down mud and if you notice that the drill piece is a little wider than the pipe,
so it's drilling a wider hole and
the casing is on the outside of this that you put in occasionally,
the sleeves, the casing around the well.
So between the center part,
the pipes that you're drilling down and the casing is a gap.
I forced the mud down through the middle,
by putting pressure on it,
and that mud will entrain,
will pick up the rock chips and come out around
the outside of the drill, all the way up to the top.
And so the stuff that comes out the top is mud plus rock chips.
And the mud does another important thing.
The mud cools the well.
Grinding iron on rock at
thousands of feet deep at high rotation rates is going to make a lot of heat.
Too much heat and you melt everything all together,
so you've got to cool it.
The mud produces both cooling and a way to get the rock chips out.
So, once I learned about how drilling is done and that
this reservoir of the oil is not some giant open cavern,
I suddenly stopped worrying that they could drill at
my neighbor's house and steal my oil.
The distance through which this oil can go,
depends of course on how porous the material is.
A well maybe every couple of hundred meters is more or less typical in Illinois.
So there are maybe 500 meters- maybe an oil well every quarter mile.
So I wasn't too worried anymore that
if my neighbors had an oil well and I hadn't sold mine.
Given them- gotten there 50 bucks to give away my mineral rights
forever under my property that I was still okay.
So of course you're watching with interest,
when is this oil well going to reach
a deep enough level where they're going to hit it and I mean come by
some day coming home from work and oil be spurting out on top of it
and everyone will be dancing and happy and a rain of black gold.
Well, going across one day and everything's gone.
There's no oil drilling rig there anymore.
There's no bunch of trucks, there's no people.
It's gone. What happened?
Before the internet I can't just you know type it in.
Right? Gotta ask somebody still had card from the guy who had come to my door and I said,
"Hey, I noticed that just well you were drilling up there on County Line,
that it's all gone, what happened?".
Well, you just cannot reach that guy but you reach somebody and they finally said, "Oh,
well we did find wonderful porous rock formation. No oil.".
Now, turns out that porous rock formation did
have a tremendous use and when we get to natural gas,
I'll tell you about how they've used it and are still using it for storage.
But that's another day. Right now we're still on getting the oil out of the ground.
So let's say they had get oil.
How likely is it that it just comes spurting out the top of the well?
Pretty unlikely.
That natural lift, that pressurization such that the oil is under so much pressure that
you've finally drilled this hole you've pricked
the balloon and everything comes pouring out the top.
That's more like a 10% type case.
Most of the time, the oil has to be pumped and you need
to actually put something at the bottom of the well that pumps it up.
You can't suck on it with a straw that only works
for 32 feet because the best you can do is atmospheric pressure,
and that's only 32 feet worth of distance,
of pressure, of height,
of head, of water.
So, you got to put a pump up at the bottom.
Many times, if you've seen an oil well you've
gone along and you see something with
a lever arm and it's moving up and down up and down.
When you're thinking how does simply moving
this pipe up and down get oil out of the ground.
That's why we have an actual pump from the oil well here,
this long metal tube is a pumping section.
This is the bottom section of the well.
And you notice that inside the- the bluish tube,
the outer tube is a rod that comes out.
That rod comes out and when it comes out and this is in
the very bottom the oil this is now going through liquid oil and
when it comes back it actually
pushes the oil that's around the shaft up into the next section.
If we look at the other end of this pump,
you'll see that there is a little ball valve.
And this ball valve when the pump is pulling
up all the oil that's inside the pipe now pushes through that.
But then, as that rod goes back out that ball falls back down,
and that next group of oil is trapped in the pipe section that's up above.
But every time that arm goes up and down,
it pushes a segment of oil about another six feet,
about another two meters up.
If you're down at 6000 feet,
you got to do that 100 times and you finally get one little section of oil up to the top.
But it works and it's quite efficient.
Slow but we will get
a little bit a few liters of oil
depending on the width of the pipe and the depth of the throw,
every time that comes up and down.
This is still called primary extraction.
It's a wonder if you have the net, that wonderful.
If you have the natural lift,
but most of the time you will have to pump and you
can pump and if you keep pumping you will
get about 30% of the oil that's in that well out, maybe a third.
You might say, "Well what about
the other two thirds of that oil that's trapped in that rock?".
You're not so lucky because having drilled
that hole and relying on the pressure to push the oil that was trapped
there into this hole some point that well is dry or at least it's not nearly productive.
