Memoirs of a Worldly Guy
The office which I had been renting in the old Union Building on Centre Street had been moved, and instead of having a private office I had a desk against one of the walls in the main office. One day I had a phone call from Van Whittaker at Canadian Seabord Oil. When the huge oilfield at Pembina had been discovered by Mobil Oil in the early 1950's some companies had leased adjoining land.
One of these was Canadian Seabord and as a result they had drilled over one hundred successful wells in the Buck Lake area. Unfortunately there was insufficient gas or water drive for the wells to produce at capacity and the company was required to resort to water flooding in order to produce the available oil.
Since the Canadian Seabord wells were closely spaced they were able to institute what is known as a 'five-spot' injection system, which requires one well surrounded by four other wells to be used to inject water at high pressure to force the oil from the surrounding wells. Van became aware of the corrosion problems which acompanied this procedure soon after he read about the problems in an Oil and Gas Journal.
'Whatta you know about pacifying injection wells to prevent corrosion?' Van asked me.
'Whadda you wanna know?' I replied. I was fudging, of course. I had some elementary second-hand knowledge of steel corrosion from my time at Cominco but certainly didn't consider myself a corrosion specialist. I was thinking of the comments one of my fraternity brothes had made at lunch one day in the early 1940's. He had worked the previous summer helping the Americans to build the Alaska Highway.
'Does anybody here know how to handle a bulldozer?' he claimed the construction foreman had asked just before lunch one day.
'I've had a bit of experience!' my friend volunteered. He wasn't exactly lying; he did have a bit of experience. It just didn't have anything to do with bulldozers!
'Instead of having the noon meal I stayed out and got acquainted with the bulldozer; by the time the crew came back out I could move the machine forward and backward and manipulate the blade. By the end of the day I was competent. If I hadn't volunteered I would still have been working on the bull gang!'
'Apparently some types in the States are using buffered sodium bichromate to prevent corrosion, so I wondered what you might know about it. Maybe you could take on the treatment!' Van said.
'I'd have to know a little more about how much chemical they add and what results they've had, I guess.'
'I'll make a copy of the article and send it over to you.' (This was before the advent of the common usage of the fax).
In due course I had rented a large flat bed truck and mounted a Golden Arrow tank and pump aboard. Deny Ryan had come to Calgary after his stint as a fisherman's helper and I had enlisted him as an assistant. We set out for Drayton Valley with a load of caustic soda and bags of sodium bichromate. This was long before the build up to full speed of the environmentalists so we were ignoring most of their admonitions about safety and were devoid of goggles, face masks and protective gloves.
Fortunately the wellhead 'Christmas trees' were equipped with numerous threaded female orifices so we didn't have a problem finding a place into which to screw our swaged funnel with which we planned to dose the annuli. At least we had a map of the area and we didn't have to travel far between locations. It's a long time ago and much of our routine is forgotten except for one or two memorable events.
An understanding of the mechanics of the injection well would be helpful but perhaps I can explain it to your satisfaction. The injection wells had been drilled like any others and a 'packer' had been set at the bottom of each production string. Subsequently one of the service companies had been contracted to fill the annulus (the empty space between the production tubing and the casing) with water up to about fifteen or twenty feet from the wellhead. In a number of cases the packer had leaked and well pressure in the annulus had built up to high levels. Unfortunately I picked one of these faulty wells for our first application and it was necessary for me to open the valve leading to the annulus. The moment I cracked it the gas under pressure from within rushed out and created an unearthly ear-splitting howl.
'Best put your fingers in your ears!' I shouted to Deny. There was no response so I turned to shout directly at him. He was no longer standing near me; he was running rapidly away from me! I have a mental image of the the nails on the bottoms of his shoes disappearing over a nearby rise.
We had been pouring the caustic soda in its granular form direcly into the annuli through the steel hopper. This was acceptable so long as the surface of the water in the annulus was at least fifteen or twenty feet below the Xmas tree. This allowed the violent boiling reaction between the caustic and the water to take place well below ground. We did not even know that it was taking place. Chemical insertion took place routinely until our second shocking experience. We encountered a well in which the water in the annulus was only a few feet below the Xmas tree.
Fortunately the input funnel we had attached to the wellhead was pointing directly upward. Our first intimation that something was amiss was a rumbling sound from below the wellhead.
'Better stand back!' I said to Deny. We had no sooner done so than a geyser of causticized water mixed with partially dissolved caustic soda granules shot into the air above the Xmas tree. The environmental lads of today would have had fits.
I don't remember whether the hotel we stopped in was at Drayton Valley or Buck Lake. I do remember the lineup at the single telephone booth near the restaurant at Buck Lake. Luckily there was no rainfall during the time we were in Pembina so the roads were passable. Twenty years later I was still travelling to the oilfields on business. During the busy development years of the forties and fifties we suffered rutted roads filled with back-jarring potholes. It was ironic to travel in the sixties, when the frantic activity had concluded, on smooth paved roads while driving out to visit the numerous Mobil Oil field superintendents.
I travelled regularly to Drayton with Don Wilson and his red-haired hunting dog. Since he was well acquainted with the superintendents we usually ended up buying their lunch at the Chinese restaurant in the hotel. I remember not being pleased when all the superintendents thanked Don for the lunch. I was less pleased when he failed to tell them that I had picked up the check and he merely said 'You're welcome!' to them.
I always deplored the debrouille popular in some countries and never offered a bribe to sell goods or services. When I had a crew sterilizing leases in the Drayton Valley area during the early sixties my crew chief regularly phoned back for additional chemical because he had been asked by operators to do additional work. We had enjoyed a couple of three-year contracts at a large gas processing plant when I was told by the plant superintendent that he had decided to use a competitive spray operator.
'What's the problem?' I asked. 'We've never raised our prices. We've always come back every year to do touch up!'
'No complaints there,' said the superintendent. 'It's just that you don't offer any bonuses!'
'Bonuses?'I said, "What sort of bonuses?'
'Well,' he replied reluctantly, 'a guy likes to go into Edmonton once or twice a year and get drunked up and fucked up!'
Drunked up and fucked up! I'd never heard it expressed exactly that way before. Further discussion revealed that he wanted me to accompany him. That's where I drew the line; funding his expeditions to the gutter were one thing, joining him there was another. Since I had no one else on the payroll whom I would suffer to be involved I left him to enjoy his 'campaign contributions' on his own.
— The End —