WorldWide Drilling Resource

Oil/Water Exploration by Harold White I am out doing water locations, finding freshwater creeks in a saltwater area. People are generally not willing to drill through salt to get to fresh water. They think when you drill into a saltwater creek, you have drilled into the ocean, and don’t drill any farther, because you will never drill out of it. The salty sediments and layers in the ocean may be very deep, but this is inland some, and a salt creek can travel a long way through different formations that are not salty. Then if you drill into a salt creek, you can drill back out again - and it may be the only salt creek in that spot. The next creek down would be fresh water. Sometimes, a freshwater creek goes through a salty place and carries the salt to the ocean, doing the job of cleaning the salt off and out of the land to the ocean. Without that, there would be no fresh water. The salt world would look entirely different. Like the salt flats area, the Salt Lake area, or the oceans. Come to think of it, there are a lot of places that look good being salty, but a lot of things cannot live in salt water. The salt creeks have been carrying salt to the ocean for an unknown amount of years and it is still going on, and we are trying to drill freshwater wells. Saltwater creeks in some areas are self-sealed and self-contained. If you drill through one, case and seal, and drill on down, that salt creek may just be travelling through. There may be a lot of salty lay- ers that the fresh water will pick up on the way up, making the fresh salty. If the TDS (total dissolved solids) test changes for the better, that may indi- cate fresh water. Well, that’s a pretty salty bit of infor- mation. I hope it can do someone some good. Being able to detect saltwater creeks and not drill them has helped my business. My drilling started in 1952. Something else interesting . . . what is a magnet? A magnet was a toy of sort. People would put a stick in a bowl of water, put a small rock they cal led magnetite on one end of the stick, and turn the bowl or walk around carrying it, turning around. No matter what they did, which direction they went, the stick would stay in the same direction. It stayed in the direction later known as North. Think about it, a small bowl with a stick in it kind of looks like a compass. Harold Harold White may be contacted via e-mail to michele@ worldwidedrillingresource.com 53 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® NOVEMBER 2019 EXB