T. Boone, Jett and Ol' Simmons

After having enough of the exploration side of the oil and gas industry, I embarked on a new chapter in my life as an oil baron. My story about the production business began in Seminole, Texas, which is about 30 miles east of Hobbs, New Mexico. Seminole was a nice small town that had probably no more than two trees and I'm not quite sure if either of those were real or not. The wind blows hard in west Texas and quite often. It is not exactly nonstop, but when you live there, it sure seems like it. This wind carries with it, some very fine sand, which can somehow get through closed windows and locked doors. If you happen to be a golfer, it is best to learn a few of those low-riding knockdown shots to keep your ball out of the wind. That kind of wind can definitely play havoc with a golf ball in flight. They tell stories out there of golf balls that have been driven directly into the wind that had the covers completely sandblasted off before they landed. I can't say that I've seen that happen, but I do recollect seeing naked birds without feathers just walking and hopping down the fairway. But I digressed a little here; let me get back to my oil production story.

You probably remember some stories of old when drillers would strike oil and it would come gushing out of the ground, just shooting straight up into the air. That doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it is termed primary production (oil that flows from the earth without artificial assistance). In new fields, the pressure below the surface of the earth is often sufficient to force the oil to flow, but there are very few new fields and most of the oil field production in west Texas has been severely depleted. In depleted fields, the production must be assisted and then it is termed secondary recovery. Various types of pumping mechanisms have been employed to raise oil to the surface, but the most common type seen today is the subsurface reciprocating pump that is driven on the surface by a pump jack. Later on as these oil fields become more depleted of hydrocarbons, tertiary methods of recovery are used to assist with production. One of the earliest methods of this type of recovery was the water flood, which consisted of pumping water back down into the reservoir to remove additional hydrocarbons. In more recent years, oil producers have added polymers to raise the viscosity of the water, which supposedly provided greater sweep efficiency through the reservoir. They have also used CO2 instead of water as the medium for removal and even utilized steam to reduce the viscosity of the oil by heating it.

My clients were major producers for the most part, like Texaco, Amerada Hess, Union Oil, etc., and they were all within 30 miles of my house. These production companies had large oil fields, which were separated into smaller units, where the production from 50-100 wells was consolidated into a single treatment facility. The actual production from these wells was a combination of oil, water and dirt (sediment). The treatment facilities would separate the water and sediment from the oil, in order for the oil to be automatically sold down the pipeline. If there was a problem with the separation and the water and sediment content became too high, the pipeline would not accept the oil and divert the flow back to storage tanks. At this point, the field foremen were faced with some serious problems because there was only a finite amount of storage space at each treatment facility. If the pipeline wouldn't take the oil, it had to go somewhere and once the storage tanks were full, there was no alternative but to shut off the wells. My primary function at this stage of my life was to make sure that this didn't happen to my clients.

I worked for a company called Nalco Chemical, who provided specialty chemicals to the oil and gas industry. These chemicals were primarily used to prevent down-hole corrosion and scale build up and also to assist in the separation of oil and water. When oil comes to the surface, it often looks like a milkshake and is called an emulsion. Because of the differences in densities and viscosities of oil and water they naturally don't want to mix and are termed immiscible. However, many oil and water emulsions are very stable and will not separate rapidly without some assistance. This assistance can be provided artificially with heat, an electric current or even with chemicals. When a treatment facility, using heat, electricity or some other mechanical mechanism failed to separate the oil and water, I was called to solve the problem. It was a fun challenge that often lasted for several days and even though these were problems that field foremen didn't want to ever happen, I enjoyed the challenge every time I got a call.

I also had several truck drivers who visited each individual well to provide corrosion and scale treatment to keep the wells operational. These guys would pull their trucks up to a well, pump the required chemical down the casing annulus, flush with water and then move to the next well. They did this all week long for hundreds of wells. It is a great job, if you truly enjoy being alone.

One day while treating a problem unit in the Roberts Field for Texaco, I was nearing the end of the unit's storage capacity when the wind whipped up in the 30-40 mph range and the blowing sand caused the entire sky to turn brown. Moving from one storage tank to another and working with the field foreman, Wayne Harden, at the treating vessels, I became increasingly agitated with the sand which was blasting my face and hands. I had a centrifuge in the trunk of my car that I used to spin out samples and was standing there removing samples when an extremely large gust of wind hammered my trunk lid which popped me in the back of the head. Adding insult to injury, this downward force smacked my face into the opened steel lid of the centrifuge, breaking my glasses, busting my lip and bloodying my nose. About all I could do at the time was to grab a rag, hold it to my nose and lip and continue to check my samples. The samples from the third tank checked out good and I ran to tell Wayne to open the lines to the pipeline. I thought he was going to die laughing when he saw my face. Painful as it was at the time, it was still a good day because we never had to shut down any production. From then on, whenever Wayne saw me come into the production office, he would laugh and tell everyone that he'd never had a chemical man shed blood for his production before.

Those were really great people to work with and I really loved that job. I never got rich like T. Boone Pickens, nor even the fictionalized Jett Rink, but the experiences I had working in that environment were priceless.