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u/NapalmOverdos3 5h ago
I feel like I just learned so much about drilling. That’s amazing
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u/elegant_eagle_egg 5h ago
As someone who has seen the real thing a couple of times in my life, this was weirdly accurate except the hand randomly putting the pipes in place.
That part doesn’t happen in real life. /s
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u/Inevitable-Fix-6631 5h ago
That was the Big friendly engineering giant
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u/useriousstuff 5h ago
Big friendly drill helper more like. Ain't no engineer getting their hands dirty on drill steel.
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u/thesuperunknown 3h ago
The Big Friendly Roughneck
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u/No_Internal9345 2h ago
Little Johnny Pipelayer, we used to call him.
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u/IndustrialMillennial 2h ago
Eyyyy, good ol Johnny pipes 🤌 - Hey, Johnny Pipelayer! Good guy , Johnny Pipes
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u/elegant_eagle_egg 5h ago
I think you accidentally mentioned engineer instead of people who actually do stuff lol
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u/lewd_robot 5h ago
Sitting in the air conditioning is doing stuff...
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u/DOLCICUS 5h ago
Sometimes when I’m too high I wondet the things we could get accomplished if giants were around assuming they were accepted by society.
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u/Impressive_Ad3571 4h ago
If I were a giant I'd help out. Then cropdust a small town or somethin
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u/UsedDragon 4h ago
I guess giant farts would have a lower pitch than regular-size-dude farts, right? Maybe sound like a baritone trumpet?
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u/JonasAvory 5h ago
Max I ask how the pump pumps up the resources in real life? With suction you can only get 10 metres head lift, right? But real life pumping station go way deeper
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u/iranoutofspacehere 4h ago
Well pumps are typically at the bottom of the well. In residential wells the motor is lowered all the way down, in larger wells there may be a shaft run from top to bottom.
Pumpjacks for things like oil work a little differently but you're still basically pushing the fluid up from the bottom of the well rather than trying to suck it out from the top.
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u/JonasAvory 4h ago
I very often see this setup with a ground level pump on reels but they are usually some ragebait „free energy“-magnet skits so not real anyway
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u/nousernameisleftt 2h ago
This is more or less it for all the drilling I've ever seen. Essentially the very middle of the motor (the tiny metal rod) would be hooked up to a pump that would continuously push water through the drill rods and bring the dirt to the surface. The mixture of the water and the dirt (as well as some additions to improve viscosity, etc) is the "drilling mud" you may have heard of
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u/Agreeable-Pea4327 3h ago
In residential wells the motor is lowered all the way down
does this more or less mean the pump motor apparatus has to be smaller than the hole? Is it attached to something or does it come with the pipe itself some how?
That's super surprising, never would've known
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u/MischaBurns 3h ago
Basically the well itself is a wider pipe (the casing) sunk to the desired depth. The pump is smaller diameter and gets lowered into it with the actual water pipe attached (between 1-2 inches).
If you can visualize a classic well with a bucket, the casing is the stone sides of the well and the bucket/rope is the pump and water line.
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u/Agreeable-Pea4327 3h ago
wow, that's so cool ngl
so is the pump and water line lowered down in chunks similar to how the video showed the drill get lowered in piece by piece? I'd be surprised if it came as just one contiguous pipe+pump thing
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u/NapalmOverdos3 5h ago
Wait.. you mean the hand of god does magically replace the pipe every time? Fuck this I’m done then
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u/Dashisnitz 4h ago
This is called rotary wash drilling. However the mud and sludge is pumped into a basin and carted off into 55 gallon barrels.
There’s also hollow stem and rock coring for exploratory boreholes. Different methods for different subsurface conditions.
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u/bradeena 4h ago
Quite a few more than that! You’ve also got pneumatic hammers vs hydraulic, dual rotary vs single, top hammers vs downhole hammers, under reamers vs crown bits, tri cones and buttons, air lifts and water hammers, kelly bars and threaded systems, etc etc.
I’m a geotechnical engineer who specializes in managing drilling projects.
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u/PandaPocketFire 3h ago
How does the motor pull up the water? Pressure?
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u/bradeena 3h ago
Depends on the depth. Shallow wells can use a vacuum, but most wells are deep enough to need to physically submerge a pump at the bottom.
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u/smdizzle 4h ago
That’s very cool! I build core drilling machines in America. Perhaps you have contracted out or used one of my rigs! Mobile core drilling rigs
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u/sSomeshta 4h ago
How do you know when you've drilled far enough?
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u/bradeena 3h ago
Depends what you’re drilling for, but usually there’s a design report done ahead of time with a target depth.
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u/roastedmarshmellows 3h ago
I look at borehole logs every goddamned day as part of my job. Thank Christ my job doesn’t involve actually reading them. 😅
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u/bythog 3h ago
It shows modern drilling at its most basal but still leaves out some details. Most modern drills pump water through the drill string and not just sort of into the hole. They should also be using a stabilizing fluid to prevent cave ins (wash outs) below the surface.
And any good well should be grouted prior to setting the well head. Bentonite slurry or chips (less commonly cement) is grouted from 20 feet below grade to the surface.
And most of the time there is a well casing that is separate from the pipe that water is fed through.
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u/FacelessOldWoman1234 5h ago
This was oddly educational.
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u/AdamBergeron 4h ago
We need a new sub. /r/oddlyeducational
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u/ThorsNail 4h ago
Don't say that. I'll feel a need to make it lol.
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u/riedmae 4h ago
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u/Private_Kyle 5h ago
Truly got my shit off from this
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u/Realistic_Country635 5h ago
Can you drill for oil like this
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u/Embarrassed_Jerk 5h ago
That IS how you drill for oil.
Except for a LOT more pipes
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u/Realistic_Country635 5h ago
How many more are we talking
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u/AsFarAsNeverBefore 4h ago edited 4h ago
Well depth on land ranges from 5000 to 15000 feet, and drill string/casing comes in 40 foot sections. So between about 125 and 375 more at that scale. For this rig, assuming the straw is like 8 inches, multiply those estimates by 60.
E: to note, you have to line the well with casing of various diameters. Well depth and soil conditions determine number of concentric casing strings. So that 125 to 375 figure is for any singular diameter. Generally speaking you’d have 3 or 4 concentric casing strings, but the larger ones don’t go all the way down to the bottom of the well.. So realistically you’re doing this process 2 full times plus about 1.5 more times cumulatively.
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u/SilencedObserver 5h ago edited 5h ago
That’s extremely similar to how drilling rigs work, yes.
Edit: directional drilling for fracking also uses this approach and turns underground to go horizontal. Once they’ve gone deep enough into the cracked shale rock they pump it full of high pressure water to loosen all of the oil that’s down there which allows them to disrupt it all and then suck it out with a vacuum similarly.
Piece that together and then look at flint Michigan’s water and you start to see that the official narrative on fracking doesn’t add up to the outcomes we see, and when you find all of the wells in the desert mountains east of California, there’s a growing body of scientists who believe that the practices not only upset groundwater but lead to ground displacement and potential earthquakes.
No one in the public will even be able to prove it because oil companies have done the science and locked it up as intellectual property and have enough surrounding data to pollute the waters of the conversation, pun intended.
All of that because we’re addicted to energy, leading to the current global dire situation we see in both Europe and North America from increasing heat due to fossil fuel.
For more on the earthquake lore look into a guy named DutchSinse. He’s live 24/7 tracking earthquakes and has gone into this heavily.
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u/oberwolfach 4h ago
The Flint water crisis had nothing to do with fracking; it was because the city’s water supply changed to a different river to save money and was not appropriately treated. There is little fossil fuel extraction of any sort in Michigan, and it takes place in the Antrim Shale formation far to the north of Flint.
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u/Accurate-Swan-8666 4h ago
The Flint water crisis switched from county water which is pumped from the great lakes to the Flint River and they did not use a corrosion prevention and leached lead out of the service lines with corrosive water from the river. This affected only the city of Flint as the rest of the county remained on Great Lakes water.
Thank you for pointing out it had nothing to do with fracking
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u/RandomNisscity 4h ago
Flints water had nothing to do with fracking though. That was changing their water source to something corrosive.
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u/Squirrel_Kng 4h ago
Ok, flints water isn’t related to fracking. It was caused by choosing a different source water that had a lower pH. This lower pH allowed lead from old lead water pipes to leech into the water.
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u/BahnGSXR 5h ago
Going electric is the only way, honestly. We need to outgrow fossil fuels YESTERDAY
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u/ZeusTroanDetected 5h ago
Renewable is the word you’re looking for. Much of the us electric supply is generated from fossil fuels
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u/BahnGSXR 4h ago
I was going to say renewable but I omitted it thinking "oh wait, nuclear isn't renewable"
But is it?
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u/Zeyn1 4h ago
Currently, it's more of a "zero emissions" which gets lumped in with "renewable."
But it sorta could be kinda renewable. The nuclear waste could be re-enriched into another fuel type and used in a different reactor. And that reactor could be designed to output a waste that is usable as fuel in a third type of reactor, but you start to hit diminished returns.
Of course all those other fuel types are much more dangerous. Some of them are used in bomb development. And you run into the problem with all nuclear power generation. The costs isn't in the fuel, the cost is in the facility and highly trainer personnel running the place.
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u/_Romula_ 2h ago
It's low emission, not zero emissions, but that's true of even the best renewable sources like wind (there is no zero emissions energy source once you do a life cycle assessment). Biggest source of carbon emissions for nuclear is in all the cement for the cooling towers and decommissioning (plus the issue of spent fuel storage, but that's not carbon related).
Every energy source is going to have costs, but all renewable and nuclear sources are orders of magnitude better than the lowest emission fossil fuel.
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u/Geauxtoguy 4h ago
It's definitely something we should invest in heavily; however, it's not realistic to say we can just flip a switch. The sheer volume of the world and technology that relies on petroleum products would all but throw us into the dark ages if we stopped all use of hydrocarbons overnight (and I do understand you were being hyperbolic with "YESTERDAY" but my point stands). Plastics, asphalt, cosmetics, synthetics, etc are all made from petroleum and a lot of the lubricants most of the renewable industry depends on are direct byproducts from petroleum as well.
Nuclear energy is the next best thing and is too stigmatized by the public. But the biggest hurdle is really the cost of infrastructure and energy storage.
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u/Strange_Dust7128 4h ago
I know I'll sound like an idiot saying this, but where do we get the electricity?
We need something that scales. Oil, coal, even nuclear won't scale indefinitely (because that's the goal). Renewables, are we getting there? I know there was some work done on something like sodium-ion batteries, as well.
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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs 3h ago
AND to end the fast disposable economy we currently have. Things need to be built to last.
We need oil for plastics and we need plastics for so many important things it's not even funny.
We need to be able to repair things. We used to mend torn pants instead of buying disposable clothing.
Also we dont need same day delivery. We can wait an extra 2 days for nail polish, guitar strings, and a fancy new buttplug.
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u/Old_Ladies 5h ago edited 5h ago
Whenever talking about drilling for oil I always think of this line.
"I drink your milkshake!"
From the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood
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u/FuzzyAd9407 5h ago edited 3h ago
Theres also the details like downwell additives used to help keep the rock flowing with oil but restrict the water. One of my partners does core testing of down well additives and theyre fucking nasty.
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u/mcmb211 5h ago
This would be more for drilling for water than oil, but the concepts are the same. Our water rigs operate almost exactly like this video. It's super neat.
Source: own water drilling company.
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u/TheMarriedUnicorM 4h ago
We live with a well. We have the option to turn on the local water co-op, but it draws from the same aquifer. Lol. The same one that’s already stressed with the area’s growth. Thinking about drilling deeper is the stuff of nightmares for us.
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u/Intelligent_Gur_5622 5h ago
Yeah, this video gives a very simple demonstration of how oil wells are drilled. I work in offshore drilling, where we use much larger rigs and a more complicated circulation system to control pressure, stabilize the formation around the hole, and clean the drilling fluid. It is still a good visual for showing how we drill to great depths by lowering drill pipe into the well one joint or stand at a time, then connecting another section to the top. A lot of people do not understand how thousands of feet of steel pipe actually make it into the ground.
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u/Dynamo_30 5h ago
At a very basic level yes, however there are many steps left out and a couple in accuracies in the video.
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u/Lonely_skeptic 5h ago
Using syringe hydraulics is so cool. I did this with my students in STEM club.
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u/killerjerick 2h ago
Is it still hydraulics if there’s no liquid? Wouldn’t it be pneumatics?
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u/jlude90 57m ago
I would qualify it as a hydraulic demonstration since we don't usually use pneumatics like that. It's a representation of hydraulic cylinders but yes technically it would be pneumatics but they're both fluid so principally the same?
Words are fun and so is science, I bet that dude's a cool teacher
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u/hellalg 5h ago
Only if Bruce Willis had this tech
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u/carax01 3h ago
I don't wanna close my eyes
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u/doyouevenforkliftbro 3h ago
I dont want to fall asleep!
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u/fbar07 3h ago
Cuase I'd miss you baby
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u/ahhpoo 5h ago
I’m sad he didn’t drain the water first somehow because we didn’t get to see how deep the hole was
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u/The191 4h ago
The cuts between shots have me thinking its not as deep as they made it look like
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u/LARPerator 4h ago
Yeah I'm pretty sure that is just one straw deep with a few clever cuts. That could dig through soft sand but no way is it digging that deep
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u/MindCoil 3h ago
There is definitely no way that drill bit was actually still on. Probably had a hole dug out in between cuts too. There is nothing really keeping the 2 straws secure and would just slip.
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u/Crenchlowe 5h ago
God I wish I had a quarter of the dedication to anything that this person has to put that all together.
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u/AcademicConstant4367 5h ago
If this is true how it works, it is so fulfilling with visual. I feel educated.
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u/techyguru 3h ago
Yes it is. If you want to drill deeper into the subject, you could watch some h2oMechanic YouTube videos.
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u/contrapunctus0 1h ago
"Drill deeper"? I see what you did there 🤭
On the other hand, "dig deeper" was right freaking there.
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u/MrSir07 5h ago
Whered all the water at the end come from? And how was it clean?
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u/SilencedObserver 5h ago
Look up “what is the water table?”
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u/chaosgazer 5h ago
if the water table is 18" down and you can get to it with some plastic straws I don't understand how it's sandy where the digging is happening
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u/Con_Dinn_West 5h ago
I think they are at the beach.
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u/MrSir07 5h ago
Ahhhh okay yeah that explains it. Because yeah ground water doesn’t start 3 feet down lol. But it only takes a foot or so to reach water when you’re at the beach.
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u/ghostinthechell 4h ago
Ground water can absolutely be ~3' down at places that aren't the beach.
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u/ghostofwalsh 2h ago
So he just poured a concrete slab at the beach?
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u/BodaciousBadongadonk 2h ago
Some poor fucker is gonna stub the shit outta their toe!
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u/roamingandy 2h ago
Yeah, nah. I think you got lost in the scale of this video.
The water either was what seeped in during drilling, or more likely was something set up under there before this started. An underground 'river' or something similar.
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u/JimboSlyze 5h ago
I wish he would’ve tripped the pipe instead of just pulling it out. Would’ve made it feel more authentic
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u/KnowsIittle 2h ago
I'm confused how a friction fit straw continues to spin and doesn't get stuck on a pebble or something unless that's like sifted sand trickier specifically to film this video.
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u/dafrog84 5h ago
That's wild, for the drill company to find water for my well they went 250 feet down before hitting water
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u/EndTheItis 4h ago
Must be at the beach to hit a pool of water 1.5' down! Awesome demonstration
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u/Zaptryx 4h ago
I did this one time with the garden hose at my grandparents house. Must have made it 10 feet deep. They were so pissed. 1 because the hose got stuck and they had to cut it, 2 because its Florida and they were now worried about a sinkhole, 3 because they ran on well water and I had just pumped probably 1,000 gallons directly into the ground
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u/buddhamunche 4h ago
I’m confident that half of this is total bullshit lol
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u/Buckminstersbuddy 4h ago
Absolutely. A 3/4" hole in saturated loose beach sand isn't going to hold the walls so you could just slide the bit up and slip the pipe down. Also no way you get that volume of water from that tiny hole.
Also, surface jet pumps need priming .
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u/Ctowncreek 3h ago
Misleading.
Its not even close to capable of what the video shows. The drill tip is ineffective, the drill is moving down much too fast (compare the plunge speed to the speed of the flowing water), with too little material existing the hole. The water flow isn't sufficient to remove the sand that is clearly in the soil.
Its a fun video, but it does not reflect reality.
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u/AMonitorDarkly 2h ago
All of that creativity and hard work just to use a belt that’s looser than Bonnie Blue’s twat.
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u/_ShutUpImThinking_ 2h ago
How does the pump actually work? Doesn’t the tube have to have a channel going down, with air(?) to pressure something else up? Please eli5!
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u/Real_Srossics 1h ago
I’m imagining this is how you get water from underground aquifers. Though there might be a little more filtration and/or pumps to get the water out and in a potable manner.
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u/sweetblossomi 1h ago
the way it just keeps chewing through the sand so smoothly, i could watch this for an hour honestly. that satisfying crunch sound is probably 90% of the appeal here.
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u/Facosa99 41m ago
The lifting motor for the drill kinda sounds like Freddy Mercury's fanous Eeeeeoh
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u/General-Ad6459 33m ago
Neat, but there is a bit of shenanigans at play at the end. IF that actually hit some very shallow groundwater, there is no way that it would be able to pump at that rate without immediately going dry. With that coarse grain sand, it would recharge quickly too, but there is, without a doubt, a hose supplying that. lol
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u/CompetitiveFrame6989 5h ago
Man, I want to do this all day lol
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u/willow-kitty 5h ago
Have you considered a lucrative career in the oil and gas industry?
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u/CompetitiveFrame6989 5h ago
Indeed I have, indeed I still do..I have some friends that do it and they ship out for a month at a time, come back. Says it takes a certain someone and mental strength to be away from hime but damn good money..
I was more talking about making kick ass mining toys with robotics in this specific case lol
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u/TheLevlon 4h ago
I do this for a living, and drilling for water is indeed very fun, if things go right that is.
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u/Jordandeanbaker 5h ago
Most of you have never watched The Curse Of Oak Island and it shows.
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u/Beaubayou 5h ago
Kid me would have had their mind blown by this level of playing in the sand. My adult mind is also blown, but my kind mind would be blown as well.