A lot of money.... for what, really?

Good news: we finished drilling today! Just as I was waking up at 4:15pm, the rig reached their revised Target Depth (of 300 ft past yesterday's depth, just past a total of 31,500 feet of hole.

And guess what we found? Nothing! Unfortunately for the oil company, there was no pay zone found in this well. The poor guys were quite disappointed since they were expecting a nice big oil reservoir.

But this billion dollar+ operation won't be for naught. They will run some wireline logging tools into the freshly drilled hole to better develop their models for what kind of stuff is actually down there, and specifically, where the oil is. This should make their next well in this area much more efficient and hopefully more successful.

For those curious, Wireline logging is the technological predecessor to Logging While Drilling. We use the same sorts of techniques, but their tools are smaller and are simply dropped down the hole at the end of a wire instead of attached to the entire drilling assembly like ours are. Pluses of Wireline: the conditions that the tools are run in mean that there's more flexibility in tool design, so they are able to perform much more complex measurements than we can. Minuses: the rig must shut down and have nothing else in the hole while running Wireline, and you can't get the data simultaneously while drilling like you can with us.

My company was founded by Wireline loggers, however (since Logging While Drilling didn't exist back then), so it's the "darling" segment of our corporate executives.

So now I wait. I sit at my laptop, alternately updating paperwork and watching movies until my tools are out of the hole and I can start doing real work. I've spent the past 3 hours doing some particularly befuddling paperwork, so I think it's time to sit back and finish the "Die Hard" marathon I started yesterday. I was most of the way through #3 (Die Hard With a Vengeance) when they just had to go back to drilling again. How frustrating!