Driller: An Oilman's Fifty Years in the Field

Driller

Driller

An Oilman’s Fifty Years in the Field

Hubert H. Hays

with W. R. McAfee

and Catherine Hefferan

Texas Tech University Press

Copyright © 2022 by Texas Tech University Press

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes are excepted.

This book is typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997). ♾

Designed by Hannah Gaskamp

Cover design by Hannah Gaskamp

Cover photograph by Pan Demin / Shutterstock

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022931394

ISBN: 978-1-68283-145-8 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-68283-146-5 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 / 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Texas Tech University Press

Box 41037

Lubbock, Texas 79409-1037 USA

800.832.4042

ttup@ttu.edu

www.ttupress.org

For Paul and Clark

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Hard Times

Shanghaied Aboard a Drilling Rig

A Bonus Education in the Oil Field

Manmade Drilling Islands

Where Drill Pipe Shatters Like Glass

Shallow Seas and Sixty-Foot Waves

Drilling the Mountains

From the Land of Limitless Labor

Different Days, Different Problems

Advice for a Young Drilling Engineer

Requiem for a Drilling Expert

Glossary

Index

Foreword

I first met Hubert Hays in 1956 on a ranch where my father was foreman. The ranch was located about twenty miles east of Alpine, Texas, and I was about to enter high school. Hubert, who’d enrolled in 1955 to study geology at Sul Ross State College in Alpine, was married to my grandmother’s niece, Marie. My grandmother had mentioned to her that we were there, and one afternoon Hubert and Marie drove out to the ranch to visit.

I didn’t know at the time that Hubert had already broken out on rigs as an experienced hand, that he’d gone to work not a year out of high school for his brother-in-law, Sid McAdams, who was in charge of a Baker-Taylor rig just off Route 66 near Santa Rosa, New Mexico, in the dead of winter. A couple years later, the Army drafted Hubert. At the end of his Army hitch, he married Marie, took his GI Bill, and enrolled at Sul Ross.

We kept in touch over the next four years. Hubert continued to work the oil field during his college summers and holidays, mostly on Exxon wells in Texas and New Mexico. Exxon offered to pay his last two years in exchange for three years of work when he graduated, but he turned them down. During his junior year, he worked a morning tour on a Phillips Petroleum rig near Fort Stockton, Texas, earning $1.35 an hour as the floorman. At the time, the Phillips well was the world’s deepest.

We went our separate ways after high school and college, and I lost track of Hubert until he called me one day in Houston twenty-five years later, saying he needed to talk with the head of a drilling and exploration company, and could I pick him up at the airport?

I met him the next day and he asked if I had time to run him by the exec’s office. We parked in the high-rise garage and elevatored up several stories of the company’s headquarters, checked in with the secretary, and were ushered into an office belonging to the decision-maker Hubert had come to see.

After the introductions, the two began to talk drilling, going over wells to be drilled. It was mostly Greek to me and I just sat and listened, but I began to get a glimpse of Hubert’s drilling knowledge. He’d arrived in a dated light blue leisure suit and open-collared short-sleeved shirt to see someone outfitted in cuff­links, suit, and tie. Yet their talk sounded like two guys comparing drilling notes in the field. And there wasn’t a subject about drilling that Hubert couldn’t address and explain in depth when asked about it by the man behind the desk—who, I noticed, did a lot of listening.

We left and I invited Hubert out to my house, where I questioned him about where all he’d been and what all he had done since Alpine. A short way into our conversation, I asked, Do you mind if I record some of your stories?

He said no, he didn’t mind, and so I began taping Hubert whenever he came to Houston. His last visit was in the late 1990s. The next morning after that visit, I gathered up what tapes I had and the recorder and took them to the hotel where he was staying with his new wife, Catherine Hefferan, whom he’d recently married after he and his first wife of thirty years had divorced.

I told Catherine, I won’t be able to get all of this guy’s stories, but if you can get him to open up with you when he has time, I think these and his other stories will make a good book for the oil field.

I gave her the tapes and the recorder, and over the years following, Catherine transcribed the tapes and began adding to Hubert’s stories, each time asking him to proof them for accuracy and often traveling with him when he left the Mountain States, to drill, for example, a series of wells in places like California.

Following Hubert’s death in 2005, Catherine interviewed five specialists from different fields who’d worked with him and asked them for their thoughts about Hubert. It was these men who pulled back the curtain on how and why he could drill a well so fast, revealing the true nature and character of the man in the field who set drilling records everywhere he went. These recollections, and Catherine’s tribute to Hubert, form the last chapter of this book, Requiem for a Drilling Expert.

Driller was edited, organized, and written from this material. It’s about Hubert Hays and how he drilled oil wells, the people he worked with, the situations he encountered, the dangers he handled, the ageless problems that go with the patch. For a young drilling consultant or petroleum engineer, it’s a crib sheet of how-to’s worth keeping around and reviewing from time to time. For the uninitiated about the oil field, it’s a one-time work tour on drilling rigs you won’t forget.

W. R. McAfee

Preface

The oil field is probably the only industry where someone who goes to work on a rig for the first time will make the same wage an experienced hand would make if he filled that same position. Wage on a rig differs only for the type of job performed. A driller on the rig floor makes a little more than the derrick and motor hands, but what they’re paid for these positions isn’t based on years of experience. Where experience counts is when a rig supervisor, engineer, or consultant fills these positions.

When I started as a roughneck in 1953, I made $1.65 an hour, then $1.75 an hour for working derricks. When I got out of college in 1960, a derrickman earned $1.95 to $2.05 an hour. Forty years later, in the Rocky Mountains, derrick hands make $14 an hour and drillers make $16 an hour.

Three different crews normally work the rigs around the clock, each on an eight-hour tour. The morning tour works midnight to 8:00 a.m., daylight tour is from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and evening tour is from 4:00 p.m. to midnight. Days off and rotations are adjusted according to company policies and preferences.

Work is usually conducted at a grueling pace in often harsh conditions that leads many industry leaders as well as hands to adopt a work hard, play harder attitude. Often, this can translate into extreme indulgences in alcohol (I’ve rarely met anyone in the oil field who didn’t drink), tobacco, drugs, infidelity, broken marriages, and wasted paychecks.

Physical work on a rig can be rough, dirty, intensive, and sometimes dangerous. Weather conditions can be extreme and unpredictable, and crews have to keep drilling straight through them. Hands cope with these hardships in various ways. Conflicts on the rigs as well as at home can sometimes be extreme.

When I started roughnecking, fistfighting was the traditional method of settling disputes and frustrations in the oil field. Crews fought over late relief, no-show relief, hands neglecting rig duties. They fought over who had the best crew, best rig, best company.

I think the best fistfight I ever witnessed was between two brothers who were derrick hands. A rule of thumb in the oil field dictates that the driller drives the company pickup and the derrick hand rides in the front seat. One afternoon they fought each other for about forty-five minutes to determine who would ride in the front seat going to town. The fight covered most of the open ground around the rig. When they were both good and bloody and beat half to hell, Sid McAdams and I broke them apart and the younger one took the front seat.

Fistfights are rare these days and if one starts, it generally doesn’t last long because someone breaks out a gun, knife, or other equalizer.

Another common oil field problem is broken marriages, mostly due to drinking, which often leads to infidelity and wasted paychecks. One coworker owned a small café in Perryton, Texas. A rig hand was there enjoying a steak dinner after he’d been drinking and gambling his paycheck away. His wife called around for him because he was late and she and the kids had no money for food. They’d been living primarily on potatoes and beans. The wife finally found him at the café and shot him in the shoulder with a pistol.

A similar incident occurred in Ventura, California, when I was working there. I was eating dinner at the Okie Club at a table across from a driller who was drinking with his crew. The driller was running his hand up the thigh of a sexy barmaid wearing fishnet hose. Suddenly, his wife appeared and slung her pregnant belly on the table in front of her husband. With his hand frozen on the young woman’s thigh he stuttered, Tha . . . tha . . . this must be a bad dream. Pushing his wife backward, he sprinted for the door. She reached in her purse, grabbed a butcher’s knife, and threw it like a pro. It buried itself in a partition only inches from his ear. Without hesitation she pulled a gun, but by then he was way down the beach, shifting gears.

Even if an oil field hand doesn’t drink, cheat, or squander his paychecks, the hours and demands are wearisome. I don’t know how Marie, my first wife, stood it for thirty years because I was gone most of the time and when I wasn’t, I had to be by a telephone in case a rig had problems. More than once, we started on vacation and the office called me to a rig or emergency meeting. Marie, our son Paul, and I drove from Texas to Gunnison, Colorado, for a ten-day vacation once. When we arrived, my boss had already called the motel, leaving word that the company plane was on the way to Gunnison to pick me up. They wanted me in Houston for a customer meeting. I was there for three days.

Today’s phone technology makes communication a cinch. Formerly, I was tethered to the landline. If I went to a movie or a restaurant, I had to let people know how to reach me there. If I had time off, I couldn’t plan it. If I tried to do so, I always got the emergency call.

One drilling superintendent I knew, a coworker in the Texas Panhandle, was going on vacation to Buchanan Dam in the Texas Hill Country. They were all packed. He took morning reports and returned home to get his wife. In the time he drove from the office to his house, which was about twenty blocks, we had one well blow out near Pampa, Texas, and another one twist off drill collars near Perryton.

I called to tell him I’d take one rig and he could take the other and as soon as one was cleaned up, he could leave. As we were leaving to go to the rigs, his wife was standing in the yard, crying. He told me on the radio, My wife and I have been in the oil field for twenty-five years and she still doesn’t understand that when the rig calls, I’ve got to go.

As it turned out, I finished quickly enough to relieve him the following night. And he was able to tack a couple of extra days onto their vacation.

The money I made filling positions for independent drilling companies following college was good. Whether you are a consultant, drilling engineer, or superintendent, word of mouth precedes you. You either have the experience or you don’t, are good at it or aren’t, can run crews or can’t. And when you get the call, you have to go. Even if it’s halfway across the world. Your reputation in the field turns on your knowledge and reliability to solve drilling problems quickly and right. And when the price of oil crashes, and most of the rigs shut down and hit the yards, that reputation is what keeps you working when others are laid off.

Hubert H. Hays

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to author John P. McAfee for his read-through of Driller and his suggestions.

Introduction

My father was a small independent oilman in North Texas. He and two older brothers started an oil patch company following World War II. My dad branched off with his own exploration companies. More times than not, I can remember my mom would tell us, Your dad just drilled another dry well and has a migraine. Go play outside.

Finally, he’d emerge from his room, smile at us, and say, We’ll get a good one next time. In short, he valued his independence, the satisfaction of bringing in a good well, of spudding in for the next one, and answering only to himself, good hole or bad.

The point is, I was blessed to grow up around men like my dad and Hubert Hays, the subject of this book, who had the same mental and physical grit, independence, and hope as every other person who made their way in the oil field, an occupation that tends to winnow out the weak and weak-minded.

Hubert was an independent drilling consultant and was the epitome of everything I was taught. And he pulled no punches as he recalled his life. His ability to instantly cope with serious and often dangerous situations on wells he was charged with drilling, or to know immediately how to adjust the drilling to avoid or improve a bad situation, all came from years of experience, of drilling hundreds of oil wells and having encountered similar situations.

An anomaly in the oil patch, Hubert neither drank nor smoked, rarely cussed, and never wore a coat, even in the dead of winter on the North Slope. He’d been born with—literally—the ability to tolerate cold that other men couldn’t, at least not without good cold-weather gear. As he recalls in his book:

. . . in January, Santa Fe International sent George Mallard to Alaska from Greece to work for us. I would pick him up. He asked them how he would recognize me in Anchorage. They said, . . . he’ll be the only person in Alaska without a coat on. It was about twenty below and I had on a short-sleeved white shirt and tie.

Close to fifty years ago I was offered the opportunity by Halliburton to go to the North Slope in Alaska, or the North Sea. I turned them down, and after reading Hubert’s experiences from those places, I’m positive I made the right decision. It takes special people and equipment to drill wells in either of those locations.

Hubert also mentions Jack Grace. I knew Jack. As kids, we laughed at his golf swing, his butchery of the English language, and his rough ways. He never received a formal education, but his determination and oil field savvy made him a very respected oilman in our community.

Driller is a wonderful romp through the oil field, and Hubert lays it all out, the good and the bad. He lifts the curtain on the real oil patch, the real people who work it, and he has given the reader a look from both land and offshore rigs and platforms, plus glimpses of problems encountered on both. Like the tornado that suddenly dropped down near their rig in the Texas Panhandle and blew away their mud shack, turned another shack ninety degrees on its foundation, and demolished a brick ranch house a short distance from them, all of which happened so fast they didn’t have time to stop drilling. With no one injured, they didn’t.

He also shared his knowledge of why good drilling crews are important, why the right number of roughnecks on a crew is important, why it’s dangerous to work a crew or roughneck more than twelve hours straight, how he trained crews for safety, successful drilling techniques he used on wells, why certain bits were used for faster drilling in different formations, the need to know about kicks from pressurized gas downhole when gas has the potential to blow a well (I never lost a well to a blowout, he says), what seventy degrees below zero does to drill pipe, how 500 degrees downhole affects your drilling and downhole tools, how the power of a North Sea storm and sixty-foot waves set his huge semi-submersible drilling platform adrift, and a myriad of things not taught in engineering schools.

I’m seventy, I’m still learning, and my next well drilled will be a great one. That’s more than a phrase. It’s a way of life. The innovation, creativity, and sense of humor, plus the ability to push himself and others safely beyond expectations, is what I gleaned from every page of this book.

Men like Hubert Hays are one in a million, even in the oil patch. His humanity shines through continuously, especially when he was working in China. We have so much to learn from him, and rare men like him. I hope you will enjoy this book as much as I have. It, like the person it’s about, is one of a kind.

William L. Wolfson

Third-Generation Oilman

Driller

1

Hard Times

I was born near Roff, Oklahoma, in 1932, the only boy in the middle of six girls. All seven of us were born on the farm where we lived. Each time Mother was ready to deliver, Dad rode horseback to town to get the doctor.

The first house we lived in that I remember had four rooms and an outhouse. We had to haul water from a spring and cut and haul firewood for the house. I often built the morning fire in our