Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
of a sky-blue vehicle the size of a fire truck. It had been parked on a level pad laid down
on the loose, powdery soil, and then its derrick had been folded upright. A narrow steel
scaffold, maybe seventy-five feet tall, the derrick had red and white struts that were fitted
with the glare of a dozen fluorescent bulbs.
Radley parked next to the trees. A hopeful thought rattled into my fore-brain. I pointed
at the rig.
“You know, I'd be happy to lend a hand.”
He laughed.
“No, really,” I said. “Just hold a wrench, or whatever.”
He laughed again, as though I'd told him some great double-punch line joke about a jerk
who wants to help out on a drilling rig—when instead, in a stroke of brilliance, I'd just in-
vented the oil field dude ranch.
We got out of the car. Three roughnecks were clambering around on the derrick. Radley
pointed out the driller, the derrick hand, the floor hand. “Just call them roughnecks,” he
said. “They all do everything.” The division of labor broke down on operations this small.
We walked over to the base of the derrick. In front of it, three dozen lengths of drilling
pipe, each thirty-two feet long, were laid out. At the base of the rig, lying disconnected on
its side, was the rotary drill bit: a trio of knuckled wheels that formed a heavy fist of red-
painted metal. Its surface had the hefty gleam of a toolbox.
“That's brand-new,” Radley said, nodding with approval. “You can use one like that for
four or five wells.” After that, it might be possible to rebuild the bit. More likely it would
become a paperweight.
Drilling an oil well is an art, one that was developed, in part, right here on Spindletop.
The bit is fixed to heavy lengths of drill pipe. The pipe is then turned—driven in this case
by a large, hanging tool called a power swivel. The rotating pipe rolls the wheels of the drill
bit against the sand and rock below, grinding and shattering downward. At the same time, a
slurry of drilling mud is forced down through the pipe, emerging at the bottom of the well
from an opening in the bit. As it circulates back to the surface, the mud carries away the
cuttings, the loose fragments of rock or sand that the bit has ground through.
“Drilling mud was invented right here!” Radley said, as we watched the roughnecks pre-
pare the rig. “They actually had a bunch of cows tramping around in a pen to produce it.”
It was Anthony Lucas who had pioneered the use of drilling mud, and it was a key innov-
ation. Rotary drilling had been around for a while by the turn of the twentieth century, but
the use of drilling mud prevented the narrow sides of a well from falling in against the shaft
of the drilling pipe, causing it to seize up. This was especially critical in the young geology
of coastal Texas, which confronted drillers with layer after layer of clay and sand. Drilling
