Well drilling is the process of drilling a hole in the ground for the extraction of a natural resource such as ground water, brine, natural gas, or petroleum, for the injection of a fluid from surface to a subsurface reservoir or for subsurface formations evaluation or monitoring. Drilling for the exploration of the nature of the material underground is best described as borehole drilling.
Duncan is a city and county seat of Stephens County, Oklahoma, United States. Its population was 22,310 at the 2020 census. Its main claim to fame is as the birthplace of the Halliburton Corporation. Erle P. Halliburton established the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company in 1919. Halliburton maintains seven different complexes in Duncan plus an employee recreational park, but the corporate offices relocated first to Dallas and later to Houston.
Halliburton Company is an American multinational corporation responsible for most of the world's hydraulic fracturing operations. In 2009, it was the world's second largest oil field service company. It has operations in more than 70 countries. It owns hundreds of subsidiaries, affiliates, branches, brands, and divisions worldwide and employs approximately 55,000 people. The company has dual headquarters located in Houston and in Dubai, and remains incorporated in the United States.
KBR, Inc. is a U.S. based company operating in fields of science, technology and engineering. KBR works in various markets including aerospace, defense, industrial and intelligence. After Halliburton acquired Dresser Industries, KBR was created in 1998 when M.W. Kellogg merged with Halliburton's construction subsidiary, Brown & Root, to form Kellogg Brown & Root. In 2006, the company separated from Halliburton and completed an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.
A war profiteer is any person or organization that derives unreasonable profit from warfare or by selling weapons and other goods to parties at war. The term typically carries strong negative connotations. General profiteering, making a profit criticized as excessive or unreasonable, also occurs in peacetime. An example of war profiteers were the "shoddy" millionaires who allegedly sold recycled wool and cardboard shoes to soldiers during the American Civil War. Some have argued that major modern defense conglomerates like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, and Raytheon fit the description in the post-9/11 era. This argument is based in the political influence of the defense industry, for example in 2010 the defense industry spent $144 million on lobbying and donated over $22.6 million to congressional candidates, as well as large profits for defense company shareholders in the post-9/11 period.
Dresser Industries was a multinational corporation headquartered in Dallas, Texas, United States, which provided a wide range of technology, products, and services used for developing energy and natural resources. In 1998, Dresser merged with its main rival Halliburton. Halliburton sold many of former Dresser non "oil patch" divisions, retaining the M W Kellogg Engineering and Construction Company and the Dresser oil-patch products and services that complemented Halliburton's energy and natural resource businesses. In 2001 Halliburton sold five separate, but somewhat related former Dresser non "oil patch" divisions, to an investment banking firm. Those five operations later took the name "Dresser Inc." In October 2010, Dresser Inc., was acquired by General Electric. It is headquartered in Addison, Texas.
Baker Hughes Company, organized in Delaware and headquartered in Houston, is one of the world's largest oil field services companies. The company provides products and services for oil well drilling, formation evaluation, completion, production, and reservoir consulting. It operates in over 120 countries, with research and manufacturing facilities in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Germany, Norway, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Missouri. From 2017 to 2020, the company was majority owned by General Electric (GE); however, GE no longer owns a material stake in the company.
Erle Palmer Halliburton was an American businessman specializing in oil field services.
Well logging, also known as borehole logging is the practice of making a detailed record of the geologic formations penetrated by a borehole. The log may be based either on visual inspection of samples brought to the surface or on physical measurements made by instruments lowered into the hole. Some types of geophysical well logs can be done during any phase of a well's history: drilling, completing, producing, or abandoning. Well logging is performed in boreholes drilled for the oil and gas, groundwater, mineral and geothermal exploration, as well as part of environmental and geotechnical studies.
A mud engineer works on an oil well or gas well drilling rig, and is responsible for ensuring the properties of the drilling fluid, also known as drilling mud, are within designed specifications.
The oil and gas industry is usually divided into three major sectors: upstream, midstream and downstream. The upstream sector includes searching for potential underground or underwater crude oil and natural gas fields, drilling exploratory wells, and subsequently operating the wells that recover and bring the crude oil or raw natural gas to the surface.
China Oilfield Services (COSL) is an oilfield services company. It is a majority owned subsidiary of Chinese state owned company CNOOC Group. It also has a listed sister company in Hong Kong, CNOOC Limited.
Logging while drilling (LWD) is a technique of conveying well logging tools into the well borehole downhole as part of the bottom hole assembly (BHA).
A drilling rig is used to create a borehole or well in the earth's sub-surface, for example in order to extract natural resources such as gas or oil. During such drilling, data is acquired from the drilling rig sensors for a range of purposes such as: decision-support to monitor and manage the smooth operation of drilling; to make detailed records of the geologic formations penetrated by a borehole; to generate operations statistics and performance benchmarks such that improvements can be identified, and to provide well planners with accurate historical operations-performance data with which to perform statistical risk analysis for future well operations. The terms measurement while drilling (MWD), and logging while drilling (LWD) are not used consistently throughout the industry. Although these terms are related, within the context of this section, the term measurement while drilling refers to directional-drilling measurements, e.g., for decision support for the wellbore path, while LWD refers to measurements concerning the geological formations penetrated while drilling.
Boots & Coots was a well control company. It was founded in 1978 by Asger "Boots" Hansen and Ed "Coots" Matthews, veterans of the Red Adair Service and Marine Company. The two companies extinguished approximately one third of the more than 700 oil well fires set in Kuwait by retreating Iraqi soldiers in the Gulf War. This work was featured in the 1992 film Lessons of Darkness.
Southwest Air Fast Express (SAFE), also known as S.A.F.E.way, was a United States airline. It was founded by Erle P. Halliburton, the founder of the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company, and Zero Halliburton, a briefcase manufacturer.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was an industrial disaster that began on 20 April 2010 off of the coast of the United States in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect, considered to be the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry and estimated to be 8 to 31 percent larger in volume than the previous largest, the Ixtoc I oil spill, also in the Gulf of Mexico. The United States federal government estimated the total discharge at 4.9 MMbbl. After several failed efforts to contain the flow, the well was declared sealed on 19 September 2010. Reports in early 2012 indicated that the well site was still leaking. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is regarded as one of the largest environmental disasters in world history.
The Deepwater Horizon investigation included several investigations and commissions, among others reports by National Incident Commander Thad Allen, United States Coast Guard, National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, National Academy of Engineering, National Research Council, Government Accountability Office, National Oil Spill Commission, and Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.
