By Paul Wiseman To be a Basin business and be a mere four years old and have almost 100 employees—this is not the typical track for a Permian startup of recent vintage. But at Van Zandt Controls, Larry Richards and team have focused small to grow big. The news is always full of stories of […]
Safety and the “Real World”
Greetings and salutations! Welcome to my inaugural column for the Permian Basin Oil & Gas magazine. I am excited to bring you stories, reports, and ideas. Some of the ideas will be new to even my safety colleagues. Just the same, I hope to bring you a refreshing look at what’s new and what’s old. […]
It’s dirty work, but….
… but someone’s got to create the footprint, build the approach roads, and do all the other site work that must happen before the “real work” gets started. Dirt work is elemental in the Permian Basin. By Paul Wiseman They may not move Heaven—although it may seem like it sometimes—but they do move lots of […]
The Keys to the Castle
Most cyber threats come, unintentionally, from within. By Paul Wiseman “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.” Admiral Oliver Perry, September 1813 “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Walt Kelly, as quoted in a Pogo poster, April 1970 The average person receives 12 spam emails per day, totaling 4,000 per […]
Gone Fishing
Here’s how Schlumberger’s Glossary defines a “fish”: Anything left in a wellbore. It does not matter whether the fish consists of junk metal, a hand tool, a length of drill pipe or drill collars, or an expensive MWD and directional drilling package. Once the component is lost, it is properly referred to as simply “the […]
More Than Just Pipe Dreams
Market fluctuations are driving OCTG (Oil Country Tubular Goods) companies to diversify. By Paul Wiseman The Oil Patch roller coaster is real for the entire sector; but for companies that rely on steel as a raw material, global politics adds a whole new layer of variables. Such is the case for oil country tubular […]
Spillover
Last month’s issue was called our “Water Issue” (see photo), so we can’t slap that label on this issue, or this coverage, anyway. We’ll just call this “Overflow.” It’s some additional insights we weren’t able to squeeze into the April issue. By Jesse Mullins Some isolated, maybe random, observations about H2O and the tidal […]
Mechanically Adept
By Paul Wiseman With more accurate computer modeling for drill sites connected to long lead times (6-12 months) for procurement of large equipment like gas compressors, long-term planning is both possible and necessary. That plus the emergence of gas lift compression as a preferred artificial lift solution has made compression services companies like CSI Compressco […]
Safe and Sure
By Paul Wiseman “We can dance if we want to… I can act like an imbecile” “Safety Dance,” Men Without Hats, 1982 Those two lines are not consecutive in the song, but for some reason they’re the only ones I remember. They’re pertinent to a story about safety expert Dusty Roach because he’s […]
To Turn Up the Pressure
The year 2019 began with the the frac industry under pressure as a whole, and pressure pumpers were no exception. A sudden oil price drop in December, coupled with downward pricing impetus from backlogged pipelines and year-end budget exhaustion led to a drop in completions—and a freefall in demand for fracturing crews and frac sand. […]
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