Drilling advances

Jim Redden, Contributing Editor

In one of my earlier lives as a technical writer for a major drillbit company, I fielded a call one morning from a newspaper reporter in the northeast. He was coming to Houston on a quest to get a handle on what this oil business was all about and to determine why he and his brethren up north were paying a king’s ransom to heat their homes.Looking back on drillbits and ballpoint pens

When he arrived for a tour of the plant, I explained that, to the uninitiated, a drillbit may appear to be nothing more than a chunk of steel, but, in fact, each bit comprises highly engineered technologies that enable operators to drill longer, faster and exploit reserves from downhole environments that otherwise would never be penetrated. I pointed out that, with new reserves harder to come by and wells more complex and expensive, technologies designed to optimize efficiencies and lower costs were paramount.

“After all,” I tried to explain, “when you’re in deep water, a bit trip can cost you $250,000.”

He was aghast. “You mean, it costs that much to ship a bit out there?”

I’ll concede that it was probably unwise to throw out industry jargon to a civilian, and when I clarified in layman’s terms what I meant, he seemed reasonably satisfied. I was reminded of that conversation recently, when the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) formally recognized the Hughes two-cone bit as its 246th Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark. Since 1971, ASME has recognized engineering achievements worldwide and their impact on society as a whole. The recognition last month at the Hughes Christensen headquarters in The Woodlands, Texas, came exactly 100 years to the day that Howard Robard Hughes Sr. gave up his law practice in Iowa and set off to Texas, where, on Aug. 10, 1909, he was granted a patent for a drillbit design that is widely credited with revolutionizing the industry.

ASME says the now-246 historical achievements that it acknowledges go back as far as 1647, when the Saugus Ironworks in Massachusetts began operation as the first commercial ironworks in North America. The two-cone bit now joins such engineering stalwarts as the Saturn V rocket (1967), Austria’s Siegfried Marcus car (1875), the Ottmar Mergenthaler square base linotype (1890), the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (1972), the Evinrude outboard motor (1909) and the ever-present ballpoint pen (1938). The list of oil and gas innovations ASME has recognized over the award’s 38 years is a short one indeed, featuring only the Pioneer Oil Refinery of California (1876), the Drake oil well in Titusville, Pa. (1859), the Cameron Ram-Type BOP (1922), the Southern Gas Association PCRC Analog Facility in Dallas (1956), and now the former Hughes Tool Co. invention.

It all began with Spindletop. It’s entirely logical for anyone outside the industry to wonder why a drillbit would be included on a list of such society-altering creations as the Ford Model T, the IBM 350 RAMAC Disk File, the Holt Caterpillar tractor, the Pitney-Bowes postage meter and Orville and Wilbur’s first airplane. Those in the know, however, say that if the Hughes two-cone bit had never come along, billions of dollars worth of oil and gas would have remained in place at a time when the world was becoming more industrialized, mobile and thirsty for energy.

Like many of his generation, Hughes was captivated with the Spindletop gusher of 1901 and soon afterward made his way to Beaumont, Texas, where he and partner Walter Sharp racked up a few successes as wildcatters. Before long, the Hughes-Sharp tandem demonstrated that frustration, like necessity, can be the mother of invention. Around 1906, the two decided they had to come up with something to improve the excruciatingly slow penetration rates and failures of the fishtail bits used exclusively at the time. While the fishtail or drag bits were fine and dandy in the soft near-surface formations, once they hit the hard rock overlaying the deeper and more plentiful reserves, they dulled to the point of being useless. The two-cone bit quickly evolved as the answer to operators’ prayers, and when combined with then-emerging rotary drilling, it cleared the way for the exploitation of huge and previously inaccessible reserves. From their Sharp-Hughes Tool Co. in Houston, the partners began production in 1909 of the bit, which featured two conical cutters that—rather than scraping the formation like its predecessor—essentially chipped, crushed and powdered hard-rock intervals. With Sharp’s death in 1912, Hughes assumed full ownership and the manufacturer became Hughes Tool Co.

Foundation for many technologies. A century after it was conceived, that design is widely credited with influencing a host of roller-cone and Polycrystalline Diamond Compact (PDC) bit innovations that have played principal roles in the continuous refinement of rotary drilling, and have improved efficiency and reduced costs in increasingly complex well configurations. Improved metallurgy, state-of-the-art bearings, slimhole designs and new cutter shapes are but some of the innovations the industry has developed as a result of the Hughes two-cone bit. These technologies ultimately laid the foundation for the emergence of ancillary tool and application technologies, like motor-driven directional drilling and simultaneous drilling and reaming, and played a significant role in the initiation of deep HPHT, ultra-extended reach and other demanding well programs.

It goes without saying, but the drilling industry is rich with the development of gadgets and systems that, to the untrained eye, may appear unremarkable, but whose impacts are far reaching. The two-cone bit clearly is no exception, and it can be said, in fact, that it had considerable influence on a number of its fellow ASME landmarks. The descendants of the original automobile and airplane come to mind.

Unlike the ballpoint pen, a roller-cone drillbit is obviously not an indispensable tool in practically every home and office in the world, but the product it helped bring to market certainly is.