Stuck Pipe Recovery: Free Point Tools, String Shots & Jarring Explained

One thing that we were kind of riffing on right before we hit record was this Blackstone acquisition of I'm seeing a lot on Twitter about it, mostly sarcastic and facicious comments,

Private equity, especially Blackstone. I mean, Blackstone's kind of the first company that started buying up a lot of real estate when people, were losing their homes and they started buying up Bitcoin. And so there's like a lot of tension, I think, with the that kind of thing. But what are your thoughts on this invarious

You know, there's just I think there's a lot of uncertainty with it. And when I say that just uncertainty with the future, what are they going to do with it? What is their plans with it? You know, data is information is powerful in oil and gas, whether it's offset production data or drilling information or whatever it is. And so for a private equity company, which you know, let's just be honest, a lot of oil and gas companies don't have great relationships with private equity or they've been strained in the past.

For them to come in and purchase one of the big, what I'd say is purveyors of data in our industry. I think there's a lot of people who are either worried they're going to jack up the price or limit access or just do different things. And so that's a challenge. There are I think it also creates opportunities as well. You know, there's a lot of I don't want to call them smaller guys, but more independents that are out there making software that can go out and kind of scrape a lot of this public information and public data present in a different way. And so, this may be a really really good opportunity for a lot of those guys to gain some market share and maybe even get some investment to where they can grow and really compete on on a very similar level is what you know and Varys has done in the past.

Yeah. I mean, one of the guys he's talking about it quite a bit obviously because it's in his industry. So, Zach Copelan on Twitter, he's also on LinkedIn, but I think it's ripping whale is his handle, but he's with forecast, right? And forecast is kind of doing a lot of the same. They're just compiling data for drilling. And Zack

Yeah. And Zach, I apologize if you listen to this and I'm way off mark on what you're doing. And then another one I came

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Call us and tell us tell us that we're wrong. The other one that that I came across like two or three days ago was convey 640, which is specifically in Oklahoma. So I mean, you're you're going from like you're going for really niche data in in a set area, which I think is pretty cool. I like specialization and I love talking to those people that are doing it cuz it's like the amount that they know forward and backward about a particular state. I think that's interesting. So

Well with those smaller companies too, the founders are the guys who are boots on the ground as well. And so I mean there's just they are living it day in and day out and understand their data and all that stuff. And so yeah, it's going to be interesting to see if it see what it results in maybe just outside of that that acquisition itself.

Yeah. We I was talking to a an Oklahoma guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy out your way he's got six wells and two disposal wells just north of Tulsa but something interesting that he kind of commented on so it's small company family is the only people that's running it and their wells are actually on the Indian reservations so it's like a whole entire different like regulatory approach to how those are handled and I thought that was kind of interesting to you know I had never thought like we've got you know out here you know federal land in California that no one can drill on things like that but at the same time like there's actually wells on that land in Oklahoma.

So it's kind of interesting. I never thought about that really in detail. Just figured go get a permit go put a hole

One on BLM land right now. It's definitely I don't necessarily want to say more strict kind of regulations but definitely more specific. That's for sure. Take a little bit more effort to make sure that you're crossing your tees and dotting your eyes on whatever you're crossing under their

Yep. Certainly more regulation. Cool. Okay, a couple questions. So, I've got I'm trying to stump you and I haven't been able to do it yet. And I think

I've probably been [laughter] wrong. There's a lot of stuff I've touched but haven't really worked on.

Giving very superficial answers here.

I will on on our YouTube and our Tik Tok channel. I will give a shout out to we had an answer for the question last week about the glycol pumps. So my first question, Wade, is what is heat

Okay. All right. So heat trace essentially what it is is you're wrapping wire around tubing on surface, right? It's super cold ambient temperature. I think I've got pictures. I was actually going through my phone the other day and I ran across one. It was like negative8 degrees. Windchill was something like negative 35. But you're you're running this wire essentially around your surface equipment, right? Around the around your piping and all that. And then once you run that wire, you insulate it. So, you know, whatever way that is, a lot of times you'll put, it's not super hot, it's not like it gets super hot, but then you insulate that and then what you can do is you plug that up into a power source and it just runs current through that wire, creates a little bit of heat, and so you're essentially heating up that pipe with the wire and the insulation so that there's not any freezing that's going on inside of your surface.

Got it. So you could heat trace probably would be applicable to more industries than just oil and gas, right? I mean you could potentially I mean are they doing this on plumbing and other things? Like I I'd imagine it's kind of more

Time that you've got, what I would say is exposed pipes, stuff above ground.

And you're you're flowing something that can freeze up, but oil and gas wells, you got quite a bit of water, or you can even have, if it gets cold enough, you could have paraffin start to form or something like that, if everything's getting cool enough. So yeah, you could you do it in a lot more than just oil and gas wells.

Okay. Well, this is coming from a guy that's only ever lived in the desert. So it's never cold enough to like like

That big part of the challenge, right? Is like the guys up, it was hilarious because you know the guys up in Willist and all this stuff, Baka and all that up north, they're like like they're like negative five, it's like, yeah, that happens, but they're prepared for it, right? Like they build a production production facilities ready for that. But in Oklahoma, it'll get down below freezing for a couple of days at a time. But what was so challenging about that in Texas, too, is that it stayed down there for 10 or 12 days, something along those lines. And our facilities just are not designed to deal with that kind of cold temperature. And so there was a lot of freeze offs. There was a lot of production that was shut in, a lot of issues associated with it.

Whereas up north, that's just standard operations for them.

Gotcha. Yeah. A lot of the answers, I think, came from guys that are working up north. So, they're probably more familiar with it on a day-to-day

Cool. Awesome. All right. My next question is, and I've done a little bit of reading about this because I was I had to get ahead of it. I was so interested, but what is freeoint?

Okay, so a free point, let's take it for drilling. All right, so you're drilling ahead and you get stuck. We kind of talked about last week, you get packed off or differentially stuck or whatever it is. So, a free point is you get a wire line, you get wire line out there and you drop a freeoint tool. Three-point tool has these little you think of arms or pads, whatever on it that will will well, some of them, they can make contact with the wall, but some of them are looking for a change in I think it's a magnetic field is really what it's looking for. So, you go down, pump it down. All right? And then what you'll do is you'll either push or you'll pull on your pipe and you'll see if it moves.

And so, you can go down like usually you've got a decent idea of where you're stuck at. So, say you think you're stuck at 8,000 ft, right? You'll go down, you'll drop your free point down to say 7,800 feet and then you'll put some stretch in your pipe or you'll put some torque in it and you'll see what kind of like you know how many wraps do I have to put on surface to see the pipe actually move down there at 7,800 ft. All right. And so you're actually measuring that the pipe is still moving based on what you're doing on surface. Then you go down to say 8,200 ft. All right. And you repeat the process

Normally if you know where you're you know you're determining where you're stuck at. But what you'll see is is like the pipe won't move now. And so now you know you're stuck between 7,800 feet and 8200 feet. And then you can just take measurements in between there. Repeating that exact same process to figure out exactly where you're stuck at.

Okay. So you find out where you're stuck, but what do you do about it? Because the reality is you're still

Well, yeah. Okay. So at that point, a lot of times what you're doing is you're prepping for your you run a free point for your next steps, right? So what at that point you'll go down and you'll like back off your drill pipe. So you'll go down and say go down to 7800 ft. You put some wraps left in your pipe and then you you drop your it's not a seing charge. You you drop your string shot and then you fire off that string shot which is really just primer cord. You fire off that string shot and what it does is it it explodes down there. It's in a fluid fil fluid fil drill pipe, right? And so it shakes it, causes this little explosion down there and it shakes that drill pipe. And that torque that you had stored down there, it right at that connection, it'll break that connection off and allow it to backspin.

You get out of your drill pipe, you trip out to surface, and then you can pick up jars. You can go in and start you know, and start jarring on the pipe.

Okay, so this is as always, I ask one question. It leads me to think about other potential.

Why did you ask about jars?

Well, I'm going to I didn't even think about that. That was like I didn't even hear that part. I was so fixated on something else. But so you're you're telling me there's two questions I have. The first one is you're you're you're turning this drill pipe and you're rotating it and it's not coming unstuck. I mean, how much how much tension or how many turns can a pipe take before it breaks? That's like I I'm sure it has before. Probably a terrible thing to happen, but

Oh, yeah. I'm sure it's happened. So, but essentially what you're doing like you'll you'll be putting wraps in it or turns in it like what you're saying and you're just watching your torque values. Now, you know what your makeup torque is. So, like say that we're drilling with 4in drill pipe, right? So, 4in drill pipe, our makeup's like 177 or 18,000 foot-lbs. And so, you'll just put you'll just put wraps in it. You'd say a maximum I want to go up to a maximum of 18,000 footbs. I would never go up above that. But really somewhere depending on where you're stuck and all those different things, you should see movement in your pipe where it's free long before you reach your maximum.

As far as how many wraps you can put in there, every string of drill pipe's a little bit different. So like 4in drill pipe, it's smaller. It takes a lot more wraps to transmit that torque down hole than it does in like 5 in drill pipe or 5 and 1/2 in drill pipe. A huge example is like seveninch casing versus 4 inch drill pipe. You know, seveninch casing so much bigger, so much stiffer that the torque transfer is really really fast downhole.

Okay. So, when you're talking about wrap is that one full 360 degree rotation of the pipe. Okay. All right. Cool.

Yeah. Whenever you're doing when you're doing your free, you're spinning to the right because that's how you make up your pipe,

But whenever you're doing your string shot and you're doing your back out, you'll put left-handed torque into it. So, what you'll normally do, you'll go up to about 40 or 50% of what your makeup is. So, if your 4-in drill pipe is 18,000 foot-pounds, you'll usually put in enough rounds to the left to get up to 7 8 9,000 foot-lbs. You drop your string shot down right on whatever connection that you want to undo. You fire off that string shot. It shakes it, allows it to release that to unscrew right there, and then you you trip out of the hole.

Got it. Okay, that's a much clearer picture. So then the idea is you've got this pipe that's down there and you can't I mean you're you can't recover that. Are you going back down with fresh pipe to then try to reattach and then keep using that? Okay.

Normally we pick up a tool. So you pick up jars. Jars are these hydraulic you know a hydraulic tool that you know what you'll do is your drill pipe stuck, right? And so you'll pull on it. You'll pull up to a certain amount of overpull and there's you know hydraulic fluid inside the jars that's moving. All right? And you pull up on it and then you'll see you'll see that hydraulic fluid move based off of your block off your hook load. And so whenever that moves your jars are cocked, you kind of come back down to your neutral and you just wait for those jars to fire. And then when those jars fire like that fluids released, boom, you get this very quick pulse of force moving. Well, you can jar up or down depending on on what kind of jar.

Some jars fire both ways. But you know, yeah. And so what it's doing is is like you can put a lot of weight on it with your blocks or with your string or different things like that, but it's over a longer amount of time, you know what I mean? Because it takes a while to move your blocks up and down. But jars work very very quickly. And so it's almost like imagine like hitting the drill pipe with a hammer is really what you're is what you're doing there. So it's a force, but it's over a very short amount of time. And so it's it can you know it can essentially what we call jar you loose you know what I mean and you get your get your pipe free.

Got it. Okay.

Pretty common used in stuck pipe

That's really cool. So how much maybe you know the number or not but like how much like what's the pressure coming off of a jar then? Like what's the footbs of I mean it's probably not measured in footbounds because it's hydraulics but

Well yeah they measure it in like impulse and then total force. Every set of jars is going to be different depending upon what size you're using, right? So, like when you're in a six and eighth hole, you can't use like seven inch jars. They just don't fit, you know? So, you got to use like slimmer jars. Like I think the jars on that are like 4 and 1/2 in OD or maybe maybe they're four and 3/4, but I think they're like four and a half

Four and a half inch jars. So, and then it it also depends too on how you set up your drill pipe around it, right? So, like how much weight you've got to be able to for the jars to be able to move with it and all that. There's a lot of different calculations. Every time that, if we have to run jars, we we're usually working with the engineers at the whatever company we're renting our jars from and ask them to kind of optimize a BHA for us, how much heavyweight drill pipe do we want? How much, where do we want to place this? What gives us the maximum impulse, what gives us the maximum force, all those different things. So, That is the coolest thing I've ever heard. I think of all the conversations.

Like that is the one that I'm like that's my favorite now.

That's the one as a drilling guy you never want to talk about. Like it's hilarious. Like you'll call these guys like you call a fisherman or you call you know the company to get jars or whatever. They're like, "How's your day going?" You're like, "Well, I'm calling you, so it's really not going that well." You know? So

I love it.

And I hope you don't have to make those calls. But yeah, that's that is impressive. Yeah. Well, cuz I was thinking like the other thing is if you're turning to the right and you've got all of that, all that tension that's built up on the pipe and then it breaks loose. I mean, that pipe could go could I mean, it could be a really dangerous situation where it's spinning rapidly the other direction. Or does that not happen?

No, it I mean hopefully it happens. That's the whole point, you know? I mean, you're trying to get free. So, if I got rotation all of a sudden, like, man, I'm happy. And it it will start spinning. But you know, if it's really shallow, maybe you'll have some problems. And let's also say that too. Like, so think about this. Here's one of the things that we're always watching for when we're jarring on stuff. Like if you're really shallow and you're jarring up and that thing like your drill pipe releases, like you don't have a whole lot of string weight to buffer that force to come back up whenever that drill pipe releases, right? And so you'll you'll hear, a lot of guys out in the field will call it like our blocks jumped or whatever.

You know what I mean? If that can get very bad because that's transmitted all the way to surface. If you're down at 10,000 ft or if you're out in a lateral like if you get unstuck that drill pipe is so heavy that that weight is is you know all of that action

Is muffled is what I would say because of all that weight and everything you know it doesn't fully transmit all the way up to surface.

Okay, good to know. All right. I just I mean that's that was free point led to that and that was that was that's awesome. Very cool. I love

I'm back in grad school. The best advice I got in grad school. So I was a in a master's program going into a PhD program and you have to like you literally are quizzed by by professors for four hours. Like you're just standing in this room with six of them in there. They're all around this table. You're standing up at the front and they're just peppering you with questions either about research or classes and all that stuff. The best advice I ever got was answer a question so it doesn't lead to another question. Totally failed on that one right there.

That's all right. No, I'm just a curious individual. I don't know the answers, which is the good part. So that's cool. So I don't know if you if anyone listening to this understands, but you're getting a fullblown education from like grad school level education here.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's pretty surface level. That grad school is in microbiology. So don't think that had anything to do with drilling. All I know I've mentioned this before and I think I'll just say it again because I'm so proud of him, but both my brothers are pilots. One of them is is much more advanced in his career. My younger brother, Andrew, he's 18 years old and he had one of his first I don't know, probably one of his major tests a couple days ago and he passed it, but he's like it's an hour on the ground of them just grilling you with questions and then they put you in an airplane for 2 hours and they put you in like stressful situations and you have to get out of them.

And he's going to a flight school in Arizona. But I can imagine like and he's going to do that like all the time and I'm like I just can't handle the pressure of even like someone asking me like what do you want for dinner? Let alone like how do you want to get out of this tail spin? Like I can't handle it. Like I can't do it.

Flying the planes there. Congratulations, Andrew, right?

Yeah, Andrew. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm proud of him. He's a good kid. Both my brothers are, but he's definitely the special one. He's the youngest. I think that's why.

Okay. All right. And I'm the oldest, which means I am naturally the one that I don't know. I got the most strict version of my parents. Let's put it that way.

All right. I'm sure my kids the same

All right. So, another question I got. What is a drilling zone?

Man, that one's a That's a really like broad question.

It's kind of vague, isn't it? I don't know. I've read it on on X a lot, so I thought I'd ask.

So, I would think whenever you ask me that question, the first thing I think of is our target, right? Like what area, what zone do we want to be in, right? Whether that's like a Mississippi well or Woodford well or a Cherokee or Third Bone Springs, like all these different things, you know?

That's what I would think is is your is your you said drilling zone, target

Drilling zone. Yeah. Yeah.

Drilling zone. Yep. Now, you can also have smaller windows or smaller zones within the zones.

So, that that plays out a lot. If you're drilling in a 10-ft zone, you probably got one zone in there. Now, I know people are going to get on here and be like, "Oh, well, we stay in the top two feet or whatever, right?" Like, I understand. All right. All right. I'm with you. But in a lot of areas, where you're drilling, like in Oklahoma, there's places in the mist that are 200 feet, 300 feet thick, that's a huge huge zone. And so, in there, you're like, "All right, let's stay in the bottom 40t or you can kind of break these up into into different intervals within the same quote unquote drilling zone."

Okay, so help me understand the drilling zone a little bit more. Or is this a latitude longitude conversation or is this a depth conversation?

This would be okay. So this would be we're going to open up a can of worms right here. All right. I would tell you it's TVD, but all the geostering guys know out there it's not really TVD because if you think about think about how your bed like take this for instance, right? Say that you've got like a say this is a five degree bet, right? Like a bedding plane. Well, your TVD I could be at the same TVD here as I am over here, right? That's my absolute depth below surface level. But here I'm in the drilling zone right here. Over here I'm out, right? Because the bedding plane moved. Okay. And so what a lot of people will use is there's tons of different terms for this. TST, which would be true stratographic thickness or a lot of times you're just going to reference a zone.

So like you're going to say like, hey, we want to stay 50 feet below the top of the mist. And so when I land my well, I'll be here, but at the toe of my well, I'll be down here. Now I may be 50 feet below the top of the miss at both places but my TVDs can be in very in huge numbers because now we're drilling two mile laterals right so like over the you know say that a well let me do some math here say that a well is moving 1.75 with a onederee bed dip you move about 1.75 ft for every 100 feet you drill right so for a th00and feet you're moving like 17 1/2 ft right so essentially if you've got a onederee bed dip, which is pretty small. All right. Over a two-mile sorry, actually, hold on. I'm having to do math on the fly.

That's what's throwing me off here. So, 1.75 times 10, right? So, that's 1,000 ft equals that, right? Times 20. Yeah. So, that's Yeah. So, over the length of a lateral, it could move like 300 350 ft TVD even though you don't move an inch in terms of your stratographic level. That's how I'm trying to say that. That. So this whole time I'm thinking that we're drilling on just flat surfaces only, but the reality is it's never that

Good grief.

There was there was a great example. There was an example once that I had like I was in Denver and we were up kind of like 30th floor downtown Denver and like it's crazy because you look right around Denver, it's pretty flat, but you look out west a few miles and all of a sudden like the mountains just jut up immediately. You know what I mean? And whenever you look at that, like we were talking about control points for drilling a lateral, right? Like in the Perian, there's just tons and tons of wells drilled. Now, I'm sure there's areas where they don't have a whole lot of control, but the ones that I drilled for one of my former companies, like we had a well, like an offset vertical well placed every roughly 300 ft along our lateral path.

So, we always knew had a really good idea of where the target zone was. You know what I mean? So, we could be really, really precise because we had all those control points. But in Oklahoma, when you start drilling in Kuster County and Deep Mist or Deep Woodford, a lot of times there's only one well per section maybe that penetrated as deep as what you want to see. And so there's a lot of uncertainty. And so like we know from this section at your heel over to the next section at your toe, we're talking about a total of a 10,000 foot lateral right there. But over that distance, you say bed dips like, oh, it's going to change. It's going to move 350 ft. You're like, "Okay, great." But that's it doesn't move in a straight line.

You know, it could go It doesn't do this, but it could go straight like this and then the last 500 feet it just goes on this steep incline and you know, so staying in zone can be a big challenge.

Okay. Yeah, I could see how that could be a can of worms, but that was that felt like a Disneyland ride.

Yeah, that was pretty good. So Colorado though, like

I don't really So, Colorado, we have one of our one of our my colleagues lives out there, loves it. Okay. And he's not in the oil and gas industry with what he does. But is Colorado good for oil and gas? I mean, I know it is, but then there's also more regulation like California and I I don't know like when when's the last time you were out there in in in that?

It's been a while for me. I I'll say this. It's interesting. There's a lot of oil and gas companies based out of Denver. I think that was strategic, used to be strategic for a lot of stuff in North Dakota and Wyoming and all of those areas. Even the NARA and stuff in Colorado took off there for a while, but I think actual drilling and production and everything in Colorado right now is really difficult. I think the regulatory environment is extremely challenging and kind of prohibitive at times. Now, I don't work there and I haven't drilled a lot there, but that's what I gather from talking to people. So, it's really interesting. There's tons of operators that operate all over Oklahoma with their primary headquarter being Denver.

And I would agree with that. That's what I see also is like they've got, everyone lives in Colorado, but then their operations are going to be Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico,

Other other places. So,

Beautiful state. I love going there when I can. It's been a while, but I do not like Yeah, I don't like flying in because you got the mountains and it's always Man, I don't fly well. And that's what another reason I don't understand. And my brothers are both flying planes every day.

You get any sort of turbulence and I am losing my mind. Like going to Oklahoma City was great. It was easy. There was no nothing crazy, but Colorado every time it gets me.

I got you.

All right, let's see here. I've got so many things, but it's I think it's your turn to ask me a question.

I was doing a little So, I was doing a little bit of research. All right. And this is off the cuff. You You have no idea. All right. What I'm about to ask I the question I had this was this. All right. If you had to think of like let's just compare Oklahoma and California. All right. Let's talk about you know a few weeks ago we were talking about renewables and all these different things. What do you think the mix of energy would be like renewables, natural gas, coal, nuclear

In California? I mean, I don't expect you to be anywhere close, but I thought it was an interesting little find on on this whenever

I like this question because I've never thought about it in terms of like splitting it out that way. I can I again I can only talk about kind of what I've seen, but

We'll just say percent of power generation. Just a percent.

How much do you think is how much do you think is renewables in the state of California of total power generation?

Okay, so we had a bunch of battery plants that went up in flames the last couple years. Actually, one of them was was a couple miles away from my house and we had to leave our home because of all the fumes and it was it was gnarly. And then you had the Moss Landing fire. So, I guess I can only say in terms of like we've got electric, that they're trying to store, but we're not generating a ton of power. Like that's the thing is like it's power storage.

Batteries aren't aren't power generation, right? That's just storage. We gota take that out because that power comes from somewhere else,

Right? Well, I do know that California imports most of our oil right now. So, we're not drilling for it. We're not producing it.

That's a huge problem in in my opinion because we as a state could produce I think the cleanest barrel of oil in the country because of how regulated everything is. And if you talk to the producers here, the guys that are still doing it, they're predominantly a lot of them shifted to construction or PNA and like specifically doing that. But as far as generation goes, so nuclear's out because they shut down the Saninophre nuclear plant a couple years ago and actually a friend of mine help is helping you know decommission it. So they're he's out there with an excavator and they're pulling this thing down. That was a big hit. I saw my

Canyon. I don't I haven't done

Came up here was Diablo Canyon with new.

Yeah, I I'm not familiar with that one, but I know Sanopre because I used to drive by it every single week and my wife grew up surfing right there. Sanopre is a famous beach break, surf break point. Incredible place. But they started decommissioning that. So nuclear's out. There's not a whole lot of drilling going on. The permitting's down. I'm painting a great picture of our energy situation. We import pretty much everything. I mean, I don't I think it's all still I would I'd have to guess that it's probably 90% oil and gas that's exported or imported from another country is what we're dealing with. I don't know. That's a tough That's a great question.

So, this is what I thought was interesting. All right. And this is I think it's pretty good research here, but we'll see.

Okay. All right. Let's see.

What I found here was that imports for California 20 to 33% of the total generation. So, only 33% is import. That seems low to me, but all right.

Right. U renewables, 58% of California's instate generation is renewable. So, of that, 32% is or well, 32% of total is solar. All right. And then it says like hydro 7%, wind 7% like that's kind of where that that falls. Okay. So, 57% which seems like a pretty big number,

That seems way too high. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got you.

Okay. Natural gas 35%. I could agree with that one.

Yeah. Okay. I can see that.

And then nuclear is around 7%. Of total generation. Okay. I see that.

And it says primarily Diablo Canyon. So I didn't research that. And it says cold negligible virtually zero instate. So no coal, which would agree with what you're saying there in the regulatory environment. Right. So now let's look at Oklahoma, right?

So California renewables with 57%. What do you think Oklahoma's renewables are? 15%.

No way.

Yes. 58.8%.

Okay. What are they putting into renewables? What is is their classification of renewable? Like what is that? Are we talking about solar, wind, all those?

No, this is so wind is 42%. And so wind is 42%. Right. And that's whenever you think of that like in terms of Oklahoma. I mean I mean our state song says when the wind comes sweeping down the plane. Plus, that's fair. If you whenever you go and you look at the rigs, like when you come out here in October and we drive out on I40 West, what you're going to see is tons and tons of wind turbines. Like, it's really it's really popped up over the last probably 10 or 15 years all across our state, specifically western and southern Oklahoma. So, I'm look I'm looking at my I'm trying to So, I'm hearing your question and I'm letting my mind kind of I'm trying to figure out how I'm thinking through this problem because and this is what I got hung up on is we talk about power generation, but then my brain immediately steps in and it's almost like if it's not economic or it doesn't make sense to build these wind turbines cuz they cost more than it it takes to produce and I'm like my brain almost doesn't consider it a power source, which is ridiculous.

That's not how it works. But I can tell you like in terms of the clients that I've worked with in California, I would say that California is more keen on trying to preserve the environment than they are in producing energy. So, like even though we have this, yeah, we have to produce energy and everyone needs to be able to plug something into the wall to get the electricity out, there's also this part like where we're super in on methane and carbon capture and all those other things that I've kind of got to see firsthand, which is cool, but it's like we don't the production conversation doesn't come up in our state very often. So, it's not even something I would think about. And that's part of the reason why we're having these discussions, I think, too, is because the truth is I don't think many people think about power generation, right?

Like we see it, you might even see a windmill or you might see a solar panel, but you're not thinking like, okay, that goes here and then this goes to my house and you know, that's how it all works. I you've opened up a lot of things now that I want to kind of think about. But yeah, it's impressive with Oklahoma

Whenever Well, that's the deal. Whenever I was looking at it, I mean, everybody thinks of California as being, like tough regulatory environment, of course, but also, super green and all that stuff. And whenever you look at percentage of power generation, California is 57%, Oklahoma is 58%. Natural gas 35% in Oklahoma is 35%.

I thought that would have been a lot higher. I would have said that's closer to probably 70%.

It's almost the exact same mix as California on both of those on renewables and natural gas. Now, Oklahoma, it says here we use about 6% coal. And so, that's where there there's definitely a difference right there. Zero nuclear in Oklahoma. And so it's just really interesting to kind of compare those numbers and see that really the mix is extremely

Yeah. Similar between both of them, you

So, is our state doing better than we think then? I don't know. [Laughter]

Is Cal Yeah. Is Cal Yeah, sorry. Is California then doing better than we think it is? And we're just like I don't think that's the case though because we really do have a natural resource that we're not touching. But then again, I'm biased because oil and gas is what I talk about half the time, right?

I'm not thinking about other things. So,

I don't know.

There's a lot of that and there's some people that have studied this at length, but man, that's your questions are so deep that I like I'm trying to like my brain is still going. I just thought it was interesting because everybody holds California as like a flagship for you know clean energy and green energy and all these different things. At least it feels like that's been the you know the marketing slogan out there in the push and then whenever I you know whenever you get in there and you start looking at the breakdown it seems like the energy mix is ex is just the same between between the between the two states even though Oklahoma's one of its main industries is you know oil and gas drilling.

You know, I'll I'm gonna now I'm gonna dig into this later tonight then, but just don't give Gavin Newsome too much credit because the reality is I mean we are facing a bit of an energy crisis and I think that's potentially maybe due to population or things like that and that's a whole another conversation, but I don't want to give my governor too much credit.

Go watch the smartest guys in the room. All right. That must be part of your homework for studying for this because you want to talk about [laughter] you want to talk about energy crisis and all that stuff.

I'm not saying they're doing that right now. No, no, no, no, not at all. It's on my list. Yeah. Tent tenant. Smartest guys in the room. And oh my gosh, there was one more that I can't remember. I can always forget the third one or the fourth one.

Tombstone. Yeah, Tombstone. It's

Yeah, you got to do

When I get my TV back up and running in the next couple weeks, maybe I'll take a swim. [Snorts]

Perfect. Well, we're here at the 40 minute mark and so we'll kind of maybe I'll ask one more question.

Okay. And this was something that was Yeah. And then I know you got a bounce, but we had a I was going through a slide that you were helping me kind of work on for our academy. And one of the questions or one of the things that was on there was talking about secondary recovery methods. So we had water floods and stream floods. What can you put that in context for me and then maybe explain about what exactly you're talking about there? So usually a water flood, steam flood, those are kind of end of life. Like we're getting down to the very end of production in these wells. And so essentially what a water flood would be, imagine that you've got a group of say 20 vertical wells just all kind of drilled around each other, right?

And all of these are producing from the same zone and you know you're they're all sharing essentially a common source of supply. And think about downhole like they're usually pretty well connected down there. Okay? So like the reservoir has been drained enough that you know that most everything's out of there. I don't want to say most everything's out of there, but like they've got connections between all these different wells. What you can do is you'll go out and there's a lot of analysis that goes into into determining which wells to do this with, but what you'll do is you'll choose maybe a couple of those wells and you'll turn them into injectors. All right? And then the rest of them you'll have as producers.

So what you do is you take water, you inject it down into the injectors. It flows down through the reservoir, it flows to all of those other wells, and then you produce all of that water out of those wells. And what it does is it not just flows water with it, it also drags oil with it. So at that point, you're getting, if I remember correctly, a one or two% water cut or oil cut is really what you're shooting for. So say for every 100 barrels that you pump down hole and that you recover somewhere else, you're hoping to get one or two barrels of oil out of that 100 barrels.

It does not seem sustainable to me.

Well, I mean, but the thing is is like that water is recy you recycle your water. So you'll pump it down in those produc in the injectors. You you get it out in the producers and go to the production facilities. You separate your oil and your water and then you pump your water back down hole into those produc into the injectors to continue the process. And so really what your costs are is your pump that initial supply water and it's never going to be 100% recovery, right? Some of it's going to go, you're going to lose some to formation that you're not producing. And so that's a those are a couple of the biggest cost drivers. I mean, aside from like electricity to run your pumps and things like that.

So it's probably not feasible to then like truck that truck that produced water oil mix out because it would just be Yeah. Your margins are so slim at that point of what you're

Covering. Exactly. So it's really recycling that water is really what it is. And in [clears throat] California they do a lot of steam floods. So essentially instead of instead of sending water down hole they're injecting steam, you know. Okay. Yeah, working very much under the same

Very cool.

Except for there. I think the steam I think on some of that stuff it has to be steam instead of water because the oil I don't know if it has a lot of paraffin in it or what, but the high temperature makes it flow as well. And so one of the companies I used to work for had a number of steam floods out in California. And one of the deals like we had our COO come to town like every 3 months, every six months. And he was talking, you just talk about your projects, he'd talk about company projects. And one of the things he talked about was steam floods in California. And he put a slide up there that showed like the amount of gas they had to burn every day out there to create the steam to inject down hole to run that steam flood.

And it was essentially equivalent to all the gas we were producing in Oklahoma.

It was unbelievable.

It was a huge huge volume. Yes. A huge volume. It was a little bit depressing. Like all the all the work we're doing is to boil water out there in in California to run that steam flood. But I'll also say at the same time, I think it was a $100 oil at that time. So, you know, made a lot more sense than

What the natural gas price was.

Got it. Very That's actually I hadn't thought of that as being even a thing you could do, but that makes sense. Cool. Well, Wade, I know you've got other things to do. I probably need to get back to unpacking and

Check my emails and keep things going. But anyways, thank you guys for joining our little podcast we got going on. We've got a new website that we're working on at localenergy.io. We've got a newsletter, we've got Tik Tok, we've got YouTube. Trying to keep it simple. So, if you guys have any questions or comments, drop me an email at peterlocalenergy.io. But wait, thank you so much and we'll talk again next