On Thursday, we visited a number of facilities of National Oilfield Varco (NOV) in Odessa-Midland. To better service the busy drilling activities in the region, NOV is putting online a brand-new, automated drill pipe inspection facility, which was our first stop. In the afternoon, we visited a pipe coating facility and a rod inspection and recondition facility, both of which are also specialties of NOV. Daniel Luna, the local manager, set up the trip and stayed with us throughout the day. It was a wonder- ful example of the strong and efficient infrastructural support that has made Permian conventional and unconven- tional operations such a success.
On the last day of the trip, we visited the field office of Oxy in Artesia, NM. This unconventional asset of Oxy is growing very rapidly with huge poten- tial. Take the words from Brent Vango- len, a PE alum at Oxy who helped us get the tour, “… 9000 BOPD when I took over the asset, running 170 MBOPD now, and headed to 600 MBOPD in 5 years”. Highly efficient drilling / com- pletion practices keep the cost low; ex- perimentation of unconventional EOR is likely to maintain the production strong for many years to come. Our host took our group to tank batteries, a fracturing site, and a drilling site. Stu- dents have observed some of the equipment used in these activities in previous days; this tour, however, showed from an operator’s viewpoint how these activities are proper- ly planned to develop a field. The tour was nicely organized, explained, and TIMED. We suc- cessfully completed the tours on time(!), which allowed us to get back to Midland and catch our evening flight back to Denver. Thank you Oxy!
At the entrance to NOV’s brand new inspection facility that is so sparkly new we couldn’t take any photos inside.
Everyone at the Calfrac site.
Students had a wonderful time speaking with all of the alumni who came to the welcome event on Wednesday.
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