He pointed out the water storage tanks, the drab, beige cylinders that were indeed pumping stations, as Hauck had surmised. How the water was fed into the well opening through flexible copper tubing and pumped down. Moss pointed out the blowout preventer, which, he explained, controlled the well pressure and protected against any blowback and surface release.
“C’mon up here.” He went ahead of Hauck, up to the platform where Hauck could peer into the well opening and the casings, which were around six feet in diameter and went miles down. Moss waved hello to a couple of the workers. “We put in seven levels of protection inside the well. Copper, steel, concrete, reinforced steel. Not a chance in hell any of this leaches into the surrounding soil.”
“How deep?” Hauck asked, peering into the black opening.
“Seven, seventy-five hundred feet. What we’re doing now is fragmentation on Hannah Three, which runs over in that direction.” Moss pointed. “I’ll show you when we go inside. You can see that the water is mixed with the proppant mixture over there, mostly sand, to make something that bites when it’s heated up and blasted into the shales down there. It’s superheated over here”—he pointed to one of the domed, enclosed structures—“then fed down into the well, until it branches off from the main well hole and goes out horizontally. So instead of having to drill twenty, thirty vertical wells like this off one site”—Moss put his hands one above the other about an inch apart—“in horizontal drilling, the capturing tubes stay in contact with the shale deposits that run horizontally under the ground. The drill tube is perforated, and when you blast these incisions at various points with the superheated mixture, it creates fissures in the shale, from which the oil or gas flows more readily. Back up here, it’s separated through these valves from the water-chemical mixture. That’s how we get oil today.” He shouted over the steady drone. “None of this would have been possible eight, ten years ago.”
Hauck was impressed. It was clear they did have multiple layers of protections to prevent anything harmful from seeping into the surrounding soil. They had even built up berms and protective ditches surrounding the well pad so that if anything came back up to the surface it couldn’t escape.
“So where do you get all the water from?” Hauck asked. “You said what, a hundred thousand gallons a month?”
“We buy it on the open market just like any other commodity. And locally we have some leases …”
“But it’s totally dry here. The river’s down. Look at the fields …”
“Everything is for sale, Mr. Hauck.” Moss smiled. “For the right price. Now c’mon, let’s go inside the office. I’ll introduce you to the guys.”
In one of the two domed Quonset huts, Moss introduced Hauck to some of the technicians seated behind computer screens.
“This is where we operate the drill.” Moss put his hand on a worker’s shoulder. “Where we pump in the water, build up the temperature, even pinpoint at which exact spots we’re going to inject the mixture into the shale. It’s all controlled by these 3-D configurations. See …” Moss pointed to a screen where there was what looked like a multicolored cross section of what was under the earth. “This is seven thousand feet down. Real time.” He pointed to a depth gauge to back him up, like a reverse altimeter. “Here’s the shale deposit.” Moss ran his finger along a lighter, almost milk-colored shadow amid various striations of gray and black. “This and this are layers of surrounding rock. You can see the drill tube …” He pointed out a long red line that ran under the 3-D rendered shale line. “I can’t tell you how it’s done, these guys are a lot smarter than me, but if it shoots the water and sand mixture, let’s say right here, or here”—Moss placed his finger on various spots—“it essentially loosens up the oil or gas, and that’s how we’re able to get at it.”
“That’s pretty good, Mr. Moss,” one of the seated technicians said, as he turned around and grinned.
“Thanks, Francisco … Here, this is interesting,” Moss said to Hauck as he picked up a multicolored, laminated chart similar to the three-dimensional image Hauck had just looked at on the screen. “It’s a 3-D seismic image. This is how we evaluate if there’s the prospect of oil down there. These trucks on the surface emit sound vibrations that travel thousands of feet below the earth’s surface, and then the readings are run into a 3-D seismic volume, like this, which gives you an image of the different masses that are down there. This mass is rock.” Moss pointed to a dark striation. “And this is shale.” He indicated a wispy, lighter band that ran through the rock.
“Kind of like reading an X-ray,” Hauck volunteered.
“Very much like that. You can see the different masses … So we know with a much higher level of probability what’s down there before the first drill bit hits the earth. And over here is what’s down there now …”
He took Hauck over to a different screen, where he saw a computer rendering of the main well, its many protective layers inside it, and then farther down, how it suddenly branched off horizontally. “Hannah One,” Moss said. Thousands of feet down, there were two other horizontal channels that fed out in other directions. “Meet her cousins, Hannah Two and Three.”
It resembled the branches of a tree. Perfectly straight ones. With various colors in the cross section, representing different layers of rock. “How long does it take to drill one of them?” Hauck asked.
Moss shrugged. “Twenty-one to twenty-eight days, depending on if we can go day and night. Previously, we’d be sinking wells into the earth all over this area if there was a high probability of oil. The Wattenberg field we’re in has what we call the EUR, the estimated ultimate recovery, of some fifty-five million barrels.”