A
portrait of one of the last men in field which ushered in the oil industry of
the later 19th century, a cable tool driller from Ohio by the name of Kenny
Rich.
I
met Kenny with my client as we were traveling on route 22 west of the Ohio town
of Circleville to observe our own operations which includes several pumping oil
wells. We noticed on a lease operated by a competitor a cable-tool drilling
operation underway.
Since
the advent of the Hughes self-cleaning drill-bit, the standard for drilling an
oil well over the past 80-90 years or so uses a rotating table through a lock
and key system called a kelly bushing which turns pipe that rotates a cutting
drill bit with interlocking teeth that bite into the rock. The only reason for
the high structure above the well that is so iconic, the derrick, is to
vertically lift the pipe up with a block and tackle, and manipulate the pipe
and other tools in and out of the well, because each stand of pipe section is
conventionally thirty feet give or take in length. Therefore derrick structure
is needed. The larger, deeper wells lift more than one section of pipe at once
for speed of moving pipe in and out of the well, so correspondingly the derrick
heights are taller and stronger to handle the added length and weight. In this
newer rotary drill method the weight of the pipe provides the force for the bit
wear into rock which drills the hole.
Prior
to the above, the standard way of drilling an oil well back in the latter part
of the 19th
century and into the early 20th century was by using a weighted point suspended
on a cable and repeatedly dropping that point on the same part of the rock with
this hardened steel tip tool. The cable tool process of drilling is very slow.
What might take days with a modern rotary drill rig takes months with a cable
tool rig. There are literally only a handful of people alive today that can
drill an oil well in this manner.
Well
to get back to the story, Dick, my boss-client-friend, and I being the nosey
types we are drove off the highway and across a field to investigate this
almost extinct operation. There we introduced ourselves to driller Kenny and
his son. The motor on the lift-arm that picks up the tool and drops it was not
running. They had the cutting tool out of the well being "dressed",
that is a new point was being ground and hardened on the tool. And the
down-hole rock cuttings were being scooped out with a "bailer" which
is a narrow tube-like bucket with a trapdoor on the bottom.
Even
though this method of drilling is archaic, it in many ways has its advantages
over rotary drilling. For one thing it is cheaper to drill this way. The
mechanical break-down of the rock does not create a wear skin on the rock that
can sometimes isolate fluid, such as oil, from entering the well-bore. The rock
fragments coming out of the well are larger and thus a geologist can more
easily characterize them and their properties. The well can be drilled without
a fluid column that sometimes invades into the rock and displaces the oil
further back into the formation. And because the method is slow - the rate of
penetration takes longer, it gives the encounter of oil a chance to be noticed
nearer to the depth where it is entering the well; in a rotary well drillers
often barrel past that depth without notice.
Kenny
Rich is an almost extinct species. He
is an oil well driller in Ohio that drills shallow wells using the cable tool
method. He is kind, generous, and hard
working. His skill-set is almost
forgotten, yet it ushered in a technological surge into the 20th century. There is not one aspect of our lives,
including the food we eat, the cloth we wear, the energy we supply our homes
with, the fuel we run our cars with, electricity, water purification, air
purification, pharmaceuticals and medicines, the list is almost endless – that
oil and natural gas has had a major part in.
I challenge anyone to divorce themselves entirely for one day from the
products of oil and natural gas. It
cannot be done. Someday perhaps, but
man will have changed to the point you may not recognize him as such.
