Necessary Roughness

two kingdoms, hundreds of thousands of miles

Life of the Well 1: Location and Drilling
Saturday, February 11th, 2006

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Life of the Well.One way to describe my occupation is that I teach software in the energy business. The convergence of teaching, software, and petroleum puts me in contact with a wide variety of people, from the toughest of roughnecks to the skinniest of computer [...]

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Life of the Well.This article in the Life of the Well series covers logging, testing, and cementing. Logging and Testing help us identify the potential profitability of an oil well, and cementing the well keeps the hole open and environmentally safe.

Life of the Well 3: Perforating
Sunday, February 12th, 2006

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Life of the Well.Perforating
Logging and perforating operations are often performed by the same people. While logging involves lowering some sort of sensor package down a wellbore, perforating involves lowering a “perforating gun” into the hole for the purpose of punching holes in the casing at [...]

Life of the Well 4: Production Logging
Monday, February 13th, 2006

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Life of the Well.My co-worker Arabinda had been involved in the Logging side of Halliburton before teaching the same software that I do. He gave me some notes on Production Logging, some of which was new to me. This is a summary of his remarks.

Life of the Well 5: Stimulation
Tuesday, February 14th, 2006

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Life of the Well.Customers may choose to stimulate wells either because previous wells in a field have needed it, or because they have run production surveys that suggest that a well may produce at a faster rate after stimulation techniques. Two of the most common [...]