Ecstatic at EnCana

Saddle Mountain natural gas exploration using new drilling techniques

MATTAWA — Warm candle smells and a decorated Christmas tree give Bill Delahoussaye's office the feeling of home.

They should, since Delahoussaye's office trailer doubles as his place of residence for the on-site drilling supervisor of the EnCana Oil & Gas, Inc. drilling operation in the Saddle Mountains, located east of Mattawa at 24071 Road L SW.

Grant County issued the Colorado-based company a conditional use permit in November 2004 for drilling an exploratory well in hopes of finding enough natural gas to fuel the West Coast.

At present, Delahoussaye said, his team is drilling through a layer of basalt about 8,000 feet below ground, utilizing a Lang Exploratory rig.

"This rig is the only rig like it in the world," Delahoussaye said, adding that Lang built the piece of equipment in Salt Lake City. "It was built for drilling in the basalt here in Washington, it was built for us."

The first Lang rig the operation used for two months was too small for the job, Delahoussaye said. The operation waited for Lang to build the new rig, and began drilling again in October.

"We were at 1,500 feet at that time, and right now we're at about 5,300 feet," he said. "We're doing roughly a little over 100 feet a day, and the record (of) any well drilled before is like 52 feet a day. We've doubled it and more.

"We are ecstatic," Delahoussaye said of the progress made. "We were ecstatic when we started getting the double penetration rate; now we're getting greedy and we want more. We want triple penetration rate."

While conventional drilling consists of turning a bit at the end of a pipe to cut into material as mud or water is pumped down a pipe and the cuttings from the drill come up the outside, EnCana's Saddle Mountains operation is using a process called flood reverse air drilling.

"The problem we have with basalt, it's like swiss cheese," Delahoussaye explained. "Real porous. It's got avenues to go through. The problem that causes is what we call lost circulation. In other words, if you drill with a conventional rig and when your cuttings come up outside the drill pipe, and you have lost circulation, you have no way to get the cuttings up to the surface, because it's going through the basalt, the holes or caverns. When that happens, your cuttings start piling up, they'll stick your pipe and then you have a lot of problems there."

Delahoussaye said the drilling industry has advanced greatly in the last 20 years.

"We are an extremely safe industry now, probably one of the safest industries in the world," he said.

That includes environmental safety — since the operation is on farm land, a fabric was laid down on the ground, then loose rock placed atop that. When the operation finishes, the rock is already sold, the fabric will be removed and the farmer will not miss one crop, Delahoussaye said.

When Shell tried drilling in the Saddle Mountains about 20 years ago, Delahoussaye said, lost circulation was a major problem, and the company spent tens of millions of dollars trying to correct it.

"What makes this company so unique, they love lost circulation," Delahoussaye said of Lang. "They can drill with lost circulation, because what they do is fill in the backside up with a drilling fluid — that's water plus clay-type additives, which we call 'mud' —and makes it thicker. So if you have any cuttings and you stop circulating, they'll suspend the cuttings and they won't fall down on top of you."

For flood reverse air drilling, Delahoussaye said his team keeps the backside as full as it wants to level out at, using a dual wall pipe — a 4-inch outside diameter pipe within a 65/8 outside diameter pipe — and pumping air in between the two pipes at 1,170 cubic feet per minute.

A crossover where the air comes out is located about 3,000 feet from the drill bit. As the air goes down and back up, the least resistant air goes back up the inside of the 4-inch pipe and causes a vortex of suction, like a vacuum cleaner.

"What's happening now is all the cuttings we're making now come inside the pipe, instead of outside," Delahoussaye explained. "Once it gets up inside the pipe, then the air that we're pumping pushes it up the rest of the way. So we're pushing the cuttings, the mud and any gas or anything else that's with it."

The cuttings and company come out over a centrifuge, which breaks the air out the top and the cuttings and mud over a shaker with a screen. The cuttings go off onto the ground and the mud goes through the screen into a pit, and then back down into the backside of the drilling.

After the cuttings are accumulated, they are analyzed by a Seattle laboratory for any kind of inert material and put elsewhere on the site owner's land for future use as a road flow.

"Everything is perfectly fine to go on the ground, no problem at all," he said.

Since the rig is brand new, there have been some issues, although Delahoussaye said it was nothing that was unexpected, and he hopes for less problems on the next site as the bugs are worked out.

"And we are trying new techniques on drilling here that haven't been tried before, and it's working, so we'll use those techniques on the next one," he said. "Hopefully by the time we drill our third well, we'll be a lot better at it and cut the time down that much more."

The operation should be through the basalt section by mid-February, Delahoussaye estimated, saying that it may be about 8,000 feet. Once through, the rig at the Mattawa site may move over to another drilling site about 8 miles north of Sunnyside.

Delahoussaye planned to begin the foundation for the Sunnyside site today, and work will suspend until the rig arrives there. A third well site has yet to be determined, but will be drilled before the end of 2006.

At the Mattawa site, EnCana will bring in a conventional drilling rig after getting through the basalt and go down to about 15,000 feet with that.

"We're expecting our zones to come in anywhere from 12,000 to 15,000," Delahoussaye said. "It's exploratory, we don't know for sure. We won't know until we drill it."

At that depth, a company will come in and run a tool down to see what's down there — be it sand, oil or gas, he said, adding that his operation will be using different instruments along the way for similar purposes.

"Let's say we're in sand at 15,000," he said. "We'll go until we get through that sand. We may go to 16,000, but 15,000 right now is the targeted total depth."