The first three pictures were taken almost by accident.

The oil fields I worked in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas were described as having either 40- or 80-acre “spacing” — that is, that is the area that an oil or gas well was expected to drain. When I was told that Kern County, CA, had wells on ½-acre spacing and tighter, I knew this would be something cool to see.

As we came back to the field camp from lunch, we saw a pump truck and two bulk trucks headed west, in the direction of the Kern Ridge field. We changed course and followed the trucks to their location, which was not on the Kern Ridge but near Derby Acres, CA. We watched the pump truck and the two bulk trucks rig up.

The first thing we noticed is that the drilling rig was relatively small. Wells get only one-tenth as deep as the 20,000-foot wells in southwest Oklahoma. Part of the reason the wells are shallow is also the reason there are so many wells: the geologic activity closes a well on average about five years into its life. Steel casing can keep dirt from falling in a hole, but it’s no match for California’s fault system.

We got directions to Kern Ridge, which was fifteen miles north and east of where we were, but I had gotten a phone call from one of my trainees who speculated he might need help in the near future. HAL had a facility on the way to Kern Ridge, in Aera Energy’s Belridge field. We found Aera’s main facility and got directions to HAL’s facility.

We chatted with the local Service Leader who was in charge of the facility. He manages the camp for three days solid before he gets to go home off his rotation. We waited for the call that never came and shot a couple of pictures of Aera’s field:

Back on the road, we passed the Kern Ridge. The sun was going down, and the wells were no closer than they were at Aera, so we returned to the yard.