High Tech and Environmental Purity in the Oilfield
HIGH TECH is the bringing to fruition the visions and dreams of those who want things to be better, to work better and be more effective while being profitable. Technological innovation by its very nature is not of lasting value. This is because someone will always add improvements or come up with a new approach – the latest model.
The oil field guided horizontal boring tool is one fine example. Invented by a Bakersfield petroleum engineer acquaintance, it has been greatly improved on over the years to the point virtually all production drilling uses this method because it cuts across usually horizontally oriented petroleum deposits. With this well drilling device, A single drilling site that can be easily camouflaged with bores in a number of different directions. This approach takes the place of the old forests of ugly rigs dotting the landscape. http://www.horizontaldrilling.org/
In my opinion, the tool’s greatest ecological accomplishment was during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill when a runaway well was spewing millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf waters. Accompanying the boring tool are software and control systems that guide the tool precisely to reach a formation. That is wonderful enough, but in order to stop the runaway well, a new bore had to be drilled about a mile away, moving from vertical to horizontal toward the out of control well’s casing. The casing is a pipe that carries the drilling and production equipment up and down and the oil flow up to barges or tankers. It is at most 18” in diameter.
Consider that the intercepting bore started on a floating rig about a mile away, dropped to the 5,000 foot deep sea floor, curved toward the flowing well and hit it square on. The casing was pierced and concrete pumped into the casing to plug the well. A mile away, a mile down, an unseen tool finds its way dead center to an out of control well to feed concrete into the casing to shut it down! Go figure!
It failed to impress the “progressive” Administration as it forced the removal of other rigs which were transferred to the less politically hostile waters off the coast of Brazil. Of course, it further enriched select investors such as George Soros with an extra Billion dollar boost from the American taxpayers.
The same technology is used on huge formations in the Williston Basin: the Bakken of western North Dakota, eastern Montana, southwest Saskatchewan and southeast Alberta.. The Bakken reserves do not rival the oil reserves of a number of the fields in Saudi Arabia - less than 10 billion barrels. The San Joaquin Valley of California and sites such as ANWAR in northern Alaska. are also busy. Other states are finding they have energy reserves that heretofore weren’t practical to extract. It has led to the revelation that we have huge reserves of oil and natural gas to the point where the USA is again the world’s largest producer.
Natural gas is the preferred fuel for power plants and vehicles. Solar and wind will never exceed more than 20% of the grid due to the vagaries of wind and the consistency of nightfall. Corn based ethanol requires more energy to produce than it makes available as a fuel – not to mention that it causes corrosion in fuel systems and most importantly reduces the food supply for humans and livestock.
"Progressives” and their communist environmental ignoramuses want no drilling of any kind in “pristine” wilderness – on any “federal” land. George Soros and his lackeys in MoveOn.Org have been campaigning against domestic fracking for several years. They surely understand it takes energy to fuel the very economy that made them rich enough to spend time protesting and destroying the property and dreams of others.
In offshore Brazil the greatest accomplishment is drilling in water that is some 2+ miles deep, then going down another 3 miles to the petroleum reservoirs. This is certainly more risky than drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet George Soros, who fronted the attacks on Gulf drilling to gain rigs at the expense of American jobs and income to accomplish elsewhere what American petroleum engineers have known all along.
“Progressives” not only eat their children, they eat their parents!
Even the floating and shore-bound spilled oil could have been more rapidly digested by naturally occurring, but fermenter-grown oleophilic micro-organisms (introducing large quantities of oil-eating microbes to eat large amounts of environmental “contamination. These die off when their food source (oil) is exhausted. Instead, bureaucrats insisted on using surfactants – like detergents that only made matters worse. In the end, Nature took care of it herself with indigenous microorganisms that took some time to catch up.
Lacking any understanding of technology or stewardship, many of them live in their own personal squalor, leaving feces on the street when out protesting. They then point fingers of blame at the rest of us. This too must stop and muddled minds re-directed to meaningful pursuits, starting with true reward-centered stewardship and maybe even meaningful work.
NOTE: Thanks for the corrections by Howard Lowe, a petroleum engineer with many years of experience. He remembers calculating the bottom hole locations of the wells that were directionally drilled at Long Beach, CA - this was in the early 1950s. “Our methods were rudimentary and we had only had a Freiden calculator. Now the use of REAL horizontal drilling is an everyday procedure and is done using highly sophisticated computer programs.
He writes, “The loony environmentalist have no idea of what makes up REAL SCIENCE & ENGINEERING. They just reach out and pull their proclamations out of thin air - knowledge of what they are talking about only gets in the way.” Howard’s blog: is www.energycrisis12@blogspot.com (SCUTTLEBUTT). See his e-book - The Sky Will NOT Fall - Unmasking the Green Revolution (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
Jerry is a retired engineer with strong experience in environmental innovation which he still applies today with 2 clean water and energy saving technologies. His life avocation in writing and study of philosophical and biblical themes as they apply to the body politic's spiritual warfare. He survived stage 4 Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2006; now in excellent health. A graduate of the University of Illinois (1958, Industrial Engineering), Jerry had post graduate studies at both the University of San Francisco and the University of Santa Clara in California between 1961 and 1963 (Logic, Marketing). As co Founder and seminar presenter he was awarded a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Valley Christian University operating under California private-post secondary statutes for mid career student, VCU was the pioneer external degree school for mid career students. Its course structures were picked up by several well known Christian colleges. Hosted local broadcast radio and TV shows, "Religion on the Line" and "The News Firm" (jointly with wife, Joanne), respectively. Jerry has published several books that are available at Amazon. Jerry is available to speak as a visiting lecturer at the high school, college or community organization level. Jerry is married 55 years to Joanne Dean Todd – 3 children, 8 grandchildren.
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