Digging Deeper : Roughnecks at Elk Hills Drilling for Gas, Record

Holed up near here in a dusty old silver trailer jammed with scientific instruments, Stu Smith is compiling a foot-by-foot diary of a battle being waged against Mother Earth on behalf of the general citizenry.

For more than a year and a half, a 17-story-high drilling rig from Oklahoma manned by roughnecks from Montana and Wyoming has been churning in the direction of the center of the earth and spitting up pieces of history dating back 40 million years.

Micropaleontologist Smith is not looking for bones or arrowheads, but for fossils--”oil bugs”--and other evidence of hydrocarbons. This is a patient and costly search for oil and gas that is heading toward 25,000 feet, uncharted territory in these parts.

If the target depth is reached--and the drilling crew on Friday had reached the 19,422-foot mark--it will be the deepest and most expensive hole in all of California, where about 140,000 wells have been drilled since the turn of the century.

If the hole sets a California depth record, it will be a source of pride for people such as drilling supervisor Ken Schultz of the U.S. Department of Energy, who said: “Most drilling engineers never see anything below 10,000 feet.”

But the prospect of a notation in the arcane record books of the Oil Patch is not the reason that this $26-million federal project grinds on, while other deep exploratory drilling has been brought to a halt by today’s dismal petroleum economics.

Oblivious to plummeting oil prices and other news from the outside world, the diamond drill bits carving the hole known as 934-29R have kept spinning--on the longstanding hunch by geologists that a major new reservoir of natural gas underlies the huge, tired oil fields of the Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve.

Recent rock samples have been “very encouraging,” government geologist George McJannet said. And a sizable gas field on this federal property west of Bakersfield, site of the billion-barrel Elk Hills field, might well extend beneath the four nearby giant oil fields owned by private firms.

“The government has no better crystal ball than anyone else, but clearly we’re optimistic,” said Robert Porter, a spokesman in Washington for the Energy Department’s fossil energy program. “A major find in this well has significance to the surrounding companies.”

The current project is the last of three deep test wells originally proposed in the mid-1970s by government geologists. At the time, the 1973 Arab oil embargo had prompted Congress to order a resumption of drilling and production at the long-dormant Elk Hills reserve, site of one of the nation’s biggest oil fields.

Begun in May, 1985, it is now the only exploratory well being drilled at Elk Hills.

Public Expense

To be sure, ol’ 934-29R has not been hurt by the fact that it is being paid for by the taxpayers, not private industry. It is just the sort of big-ticket wildcat drilling venture that the industry has all but abandoned since the price of crude oil collapsed last year.

“The prices just aren’t economical,” says Donald Goodson, contract manager of the Elk Hills project for Parker Drilling Co. of Tulsa, Okla., which is digging the hole. Specialists in deep-well drilling, Parker has no comparable project under way, and 66 of its 81 rigs are idle altogether. Parker is retained by Bechtel Petroleum Operations, which runs Elk Hills for the government.

The Reagan Administration wants to sell the entire Elk Hills field to get the government out of the oil business, and the Energy Department’s Porter jokes that the continuation of the deep-well venture at today’s oil prices “may show that the government doesn’t operate like a very good oil company.” But he and others are quick to defend the continuing funding of the project, which began several months before oil prices collapsed.

“Given the investment to date and the cost entailed in shutting the hole down, we made the judgment that it made more cost-effective sense to go ahead and complete the well,” Porter said.

Wears Out Equipment

In addition to hiring Parker’s 174-foot-high rig, one of the world’s largest, and a 22-man crew on a seven-day, ‘round-the-clock basis, the government must cough up anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000 for each turbine-powered drilling bit. So far, the project has worn out 120 bits, some of which use diamonds mined from Zaire to cut through the rock.

About $16.5 million has been spent on the venture so far, and Schultz said drilling costs have dropped so much for lack of demand during the oil-price slump that the crew should reach 25,000 feet for considerably less than the budgeted $26 million.

At such extreme depths, moreover, the drillers are likely to find natural gas rather than oil--which promises slightly better economics today anyway. Schultz said that at current prices for natural gas and a “reasonable” flow of gas from the reservoir, such a well would pay for itself in four years.

The term deep drilling is loosely applied to wells deeper than 15,000 feet as against the average well of about 4,400 feet. But the word deep is relative indeed. No wells dug to date have gotten even 0.2% of the way to the center of the earth, which is about 21 million feet, or nearly 4,000 miles, below the surface.

Deeper Soviet Well

As deep holes go, the one at Elk Hills admittedly is not much compared to the research well that the Russians have been doggedly working on west of Murmansk since 1970. The Soviets are at 39,586 feet and holding, more or less--having progressed a total of six feet since 1984. Smith explained, “You run into incredibly hard stones at those depths.”

In the hierarchy of the world’s deep holes, California fell from the top spot in 1955, when an Ohio Oil Co. test well of more than 21,000 feet about 20 miles east of here was undercut by a since-forgotten hole somewhere else.

The U.S. record, at 31,444 feet, is held by an abandoned well named Bertha Rogers in Oklahoma’s deep Anadarko Basin. In industry parlance, it was a dry hole. Tenneco Oil claims the California record of 22,711 feet at a Kern County well abandoned as dry in 1976.

(Oil aside, deep-hole drilling has been getting increased attention from scientists studying earthquakes and other phenomena. Parker Drilling has been hired to dig a 16,000-foot hole near the San Andreas Fault north of San Bernardino, in the first of what is intended to be a series of research wells funded by the National Science Foundation.

(Drilling began on the project two weeks ago near Cajon Junction, Calif., by a Stanford University-led academic consortium called Deep Observation and Sampling of the Earth’s Continental Crust Inc. Parker calls it the deepest hole ever to be drilled for scientific study in the United States.)

More Complicated Matter

Most oil wells take just a few weeks to drill, but deep-hole projects take on a character all their own. The crew at Elk Hills is pretty well settled in.

A gas barbecue has been rigged up to fix meals at the drilling site on the Oklahoma-like landscape east of Taft, and one construction trailer boasts a videocassette recorder and the type of movies one might expect. For the roughnecks, the five-mile-deep venture promises stable work by today’s Oil Patch standards, but the job itself is not much different from that on any other well.

“It just takes longer,” said chain hand Dan Grabofsky, 30, of Malta, Mont.

From his vantage point a couple of hundred feet from the drilling rig, scientist Smith records the entire trip down into the earth on a chart. He logs--in remarkable detail--the material brought up to the earth’s surface as part of the drilling “mud,” the muddy liquid that continuously circulates in the hole to cool the drilling apparatus and remove the cuttings.

Smith, an independent operator from Bakersfield, is known in the business as a “mud logger.” In the industry’s early days, he would have been called a “mud sniffer” because the smell of the mud told whether it contained petroleum.

Difficult to Analyze

It is more sophisticated today, although Smith said the heat generated by the friction of the diamond-studded drilling bits blackens the cuttings to the point where it can be difficult to analyze them. The bits cut into the rock at 650 revolutions per minute at the bottom of a “string” of steel drill pipes and related equipment that by last week weighed 385,000 pounds.

His trailer, a 1959 Boles Aero model, is connected to the drilling platform with a jury-rigged, above-ground plastic tube that captures any natural gas brought up by the drilling mud and transmits it to his equipment for analysis.

“Right now we’re in the Zemmorian, which is the lower-most part of the Miocene Age,” he explained one day recently, pointing to his foot-by-foot log tracking the progress of the drill bit. “That was about 40 million years ago.”

Deep wells have their advantages. As the pace ebbs and flows--every 100 hours or so the drilling bit must be hoisted the several miles to the surface and replaced, a 16-hour process--the conservative-minded Smith finds time to write letters to politicians and newspaper editors about issues of the day.

As the venture draws to a close--at the present rate, the drill bit could reach the target of 25,000 feet in April, and the project could end sooner if it first hits the so-called “basement” marking the end of the sedimentary rock--there are those who believe that its outcome could affect the fate of Elk Hills itself.

Reagan Sale Proposal

President Reagan’s fiscal 1988 budget proposed that the petroleum reserve and a companion one at Teapot Dome, Wyo., be sold to private interests. Congressional opponents have responded that any such sale should await higher oil prices so that the Treasury can command a higher price, while others say that the government should keep the reserves for national security purposes.

A major discovery by this test well would normally call for several adjacent wells to be drilled to establish the size of the new reservoir, a process that could take several more years.

“If they hit this well, it could torpedo the plans for selling the field,” said Bill Rintoul, a well-known oil historian based in Bakersfield. “It would be like selling something without knowing exactly what it was. They could be accused of giving the thing away.”

But for now, there’s intrigue enough in the drilling itself.

“What separates the men from the boys,” said drilling engineer Schultz, who also directed the two previous deep-test projects nearby, holes that dipped below 18,000 feet, “is the ability to form a mental picture of what’s going on down there.”