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A Turnaround in U.S. Oil Output
from Engineering Marvels
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

Workers in Midland, Tex., with a pipe to be lowered into the drill string of an oil rig that was boring to a depth of nearly 11,000 feet.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesWorkers in Midland, Tex., with a pipe to be lowered into the drill string of an oil rig that was boring to a depth of nearly 11,000 feet.
Green: Business

As Eric Lipton and I write in The Times, oil production is increasing rapidly in the United States even as gasoline consumption is falling.

The revolution in production in Texas and across the country is partly tied to the rising price of oil over much of the last decade, which propelled aggressive technological experimentation and development. (Government encouragement over the last several administrations helped as well.)

Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have been around for years, but over the last five years, engineers have fine-tuned these and other techniques, even as many environmentalists worry about their impact on water and air.

Computer programs have been developed to simulate wells before they are even drilled. Advanced fiber optics permit senior engineers at company headquarters to keep track of drillers on the well pad, telling them when necessary where to direct the drill bit and what pressure to use in injecting fracking fluids. Seismic work has become far more sophisticated, with drillers dropping microphones down adjacent wells to measure seismic events resulting from a fracking job so they can more accurately determine the porosity and permeability of rocks when they drill nearby in the future.

Just a decade ago, complete wells were fracked at the same time with millions of gallons of water, sand and chemical gels. Now the wells are fracked in stages, with various kinds of plugs and balls used to isolate the bursting of rock one section at a time, allowing for longer-reaching, more productive horizontal wells. A well that once took two days to drill can now be drilled in seven hours.

“We’re having a revolution — and we’re just scratching the surface.”

— Steve Farris,
Chief executive, Apache

For instance, when the Apache Corporation began drilling in the 100,000-acre Deadwood field in the West Texas Permian basin in 2010, there had only been a trickle of production there. The deep shale, limestone and other hard rocks had potential, but for years they had not been considered economically viable. The rocks were so hard, they would have likely sheared off the usual diamond cutters on the blade of any drill bit attempting to cut through.

But new adhesives and harder alloys have made diamond cutters and drill bits tougher in recent years. Meanwhile, Apache experimented with powerful underground motors to rotate drilling bits at a faster rate. Now, a well that might have taken 30 days to drill can be drilled in just 10, for a savings of $500,000 a well.

“By saving that money, you can spend more on fracking, which translates into more sand and more stages and better productivity,” said John J. Christmann, the Apache vice president in charge of Permian basin operations.

Apache has already drilled 213 wells in the field, producing 9,000 barrels a day. With 13 rigs running, it hopes to eventually drill more than 1,000 wells, and produce 20,000 barrels a day there.

“We’re having a revolution,” said Steve Farris, Apache’s chief executive. “And we’re just scratching the surface.”

The company is already producing so much oil, and associated natural gas and gas liquids like butane and ethane, that it has teamed with Crosstex Energy to build an $85 million natural gas processing plant to avoid flaring wasted gas. Crosstex in turn has bought and upgraded a nearby railroad terminal to transport the gas liquids to Louisiana for petrochemical refining. Similar developments are unfolding across North Dakota, Wyoming, Ohio, Colorado and even Kansas.

Environmentalists are critical because burning more fossil fuels contributes to climate change.

“Life needs to be protected and global warming is the most profound threat to life on earth.” said Jay Lininger, an ecologist at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is pushing the federal government to protect wildlife from the effects of drilling in the Permian Basin, the Gulf of Mexico and the Alaskan Arctic.