Posted by
theoilpatchplug on Friday, November 10, 2006 8:14:31 PM
Is it that old long shot horse. The one you bet your last $3 on that broke down in the straight away. You were sure it looked at the tote board and saw they were paying 100-to-1 odds. Is it a worthless piece of metal shaped like a coin to get you past the toll booth? Most would say it's a thing you put in the wall to get electricity to your t.v. set?
In the “Oil Bidness” plugging is what you do to a dry hole or an old stripper well that's no longer making money. This is an expensive proposition- you seal up the producing zones with cement and plug up the production casing (big pipe). Plugging an old well, that's made you and some friend’s money, is almost like stootin your horse- unless it was that nag that lost your last $3.
Here in Texas, there is another type of plug. It's s serpentine plug or a volcanic mound. Serpentine Plugs were ancient volcanoes that erupted and were filled in with debris and sediments from ancient seas. If you can find them they can make pretty good oil fields.
In a small town of Thrall, Texas in 1914 had a Jed Clampitt story. A farmer drilling irrigation well struck oil at 420 feet. The next well came in at 5000 barrels of oil per day at 1000 feet. Pretty soon, there were oil wells drilled on every single acre. They did not need the natural gas, so it was vented into the air. Soon, as the pressure from the vented natural gas began to wane the production dropped from a monthly high of 265,000 barrels of oil to 30,000 barrels per month to a few hundred barrels per month. This 1000 acre old volcano and a couple of other plugs supported it's on refinery in the 30's until an explosion killed a worker.
The old Thrall Field is now a grave yard of wells being plugged by contractors for the Texas Railroad Commission because of environmental problems from rusted casing and leaking wells.
The old plug gave up 3,000,000 barrels and there is still 25-30 million still in the ground that can't be gotten out.
Today the whole county only produces a few hundred barrels per month. Nobody is fool enough to look for more-except for me.