Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Radley and his dad were their own middle management and technical staff, working their
own leases every day. Radley's wife ran the office, and his son worked for the company as
well. (The roughnecks were freelancers.)
Radley's other trick was to avoid rental and contractor fees by owning his own oil rig.
Usually, a small operation like this would contract the drilling to someone else. But not
Radley.
“That's mine!” he said, pointing at the drilling rig. “That bulldozer, that's mine!
Everything out here is mine! That's why I can make it on a five-barrel well. And we do our
own geology.”
This meant they saved money by forgoing sophisticated geophysical analysis, like seis-
mic reflection or gravity surveys. Instead, they used a simpler method. Radley demon-
strated it for me by scratching his head and then pointing at a spot on the ground.
“This looks good!” he said.
By eleven in the morning, we were 250 feet deep and settling into the rhythm of the
work. The rig's engine would rev up, and the section of drilling pipe would descend into
the ground, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, depending on the character of sand or rock
the bit was working through. Once the section of pipe had fully descended, it was time to
detach the power swivel, pull another piece of heavy pipe off the rack, hoist it upright, and
thread it into the string. One of the roughnecks would reattach the power swivel to the top
of it all, and then drilling would begin again.
It wasn't easy work. The roughnecks were in constant motion, guiding the new lengths
of pipe into place, making sure they sat correctly, spraying excess mud off the drilling plat-
form with a hose, readying the next stage of pipe. Radley timed the intervals between stages
of drilling, to see how efficient his workers were in the changeover. “About three minutes,”
he said. “Pretty good.”
This was Radley in the role of both “pusher” and “company man,” the two people whose
job on a well is to make sure that it gets drilled without wasting time or money. And if Rad-
ley was a bit casual as a pusher, that was only because he knew and trusted his crew. The
most important thing, in his view, was that he manage the well in person.
“On those big rigs,” he said, “the pusher's in a trailer, he's got screens with pressure,
drill speed, temperature, how many feet per minute, per hour, or whatever. And he just sits
there and watches the screens.”
He shook his head. “To me, that's not drilling. That's
bullshit
.”
Section after section of the drill string descended into the ground, and we got bored.
Radley and I hopped into his truck and took a spin around the lease. He had owned oil
wells in one form or another since he was fifteen years old, when his father had encouraged
