The Boom (39 page)

In 2010 Cooke woke up in the middle of the night thinking about cement and his tool for the first time in a quarter century. The Deepwater Horizon was in the news. The giant offshore floating platform had lost control of the well it was drilling in five thousand feet of water, nearly fifty miles from the Louisiana coast. The resulting explosion had killed eleven workers. BP scrambled for months to cap the half-finished well sitting on the seafloor. Millions of barrels’ worth of oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, making it “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced,” according to a presidential commission that examined the disaster.

I covered the Deepwater Horizon for the
Wall Street Journal
. Early on, much media attention focused on the failure of the blowout preventer, a several-story-tall set of valves on the ocean floor that was supposed to deploy giant shears to cut and seal off the well. It came within two inches of clamping shut, but it didn’t close off the oil flow. Soon after the blowout, many petroleum engineers began to suspect the root problem was that something had gone wrong with the well construction, and, in particular, the cement in the wellbore. Cooke was among the industry insiders who zeroed in on the cement. As the well gushed crude into the gulf like an open wound, Cooke woke up thinking about the well. He thought about his invention, called a radial differential temperature log, or RDT, and whether it could have prevented the disaster. He decided the answer was likely yes.

It is impossible to know if his tool would have detected cement problems on the Deepwater Horizon, but it is possible that using better cement evaluation tools would have helped. A couple days before BP lost control of the well, the company’s foreman on the rig ordered a full suite of diagnostic tools to make sure the cement had set and formed a solid seal. Oil-field service company Schlumberger sent a team to the rig by helicopter. To most people, Schlumberger is not as well known as Halliburton, which vaulted into the public eye after Dick Cheney, its chief executive, left the company to join George W. Bush’s presidential ticket. Despite a lower profile, Schlumberger, or Big Blue, as it is known, is the largest Western oil-field service company in the world, followed by Halliburton, aka Big Red. Schlumberger’s crew arrived on the Deepwater Horizon on April 18, 2010, two days before the well blowout. BP had ordered a cement bond log as well as more sophisticated tools, including an isolation scanner, which is similar in some respects to Cooke’s tool.

The crew members waited for two days to run the tests and then BP sent them home. They departed by helicopter ten hours before the explosion. The tests were never run. Schlumberger charged BP $128,000 for its workers and tools, even though they didn’t do anything. The bill was a rounding error for a well that cost about $100 million. However, the well was running over budget and had taken more time than expected. Running the Schlumberger tests would have required eight hours. BP relied, instead, on another test to determine if the well was secure. The test results were confusing and anomalous. Instead of stopping work to figure out what was going on, workers aboard the drilling rig decided to press ahead. The federal government would later file criminal charges against two BP workers responsible for running and interpreting this test. The cement had not created an effective barrier, and without detecting this failure, BP and the crew were dangerously vulnerable.

Shales aren’t high-pressure reservoirs, like the one encountered by the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. When BP’s drill bit reached the targeted sandy reservoir, a combustible mixture of natural gas and petroleum liquids in the pressurized “pay zone” pushed its way up and out of the well and onto the floor of the drilling rig, where it ignited with lethal results. Drill into shale and nothing will happen. Companies need to smash the shale into submission before it gives up its hydrocarbons. Cooke understood this distinction. But the basic principle of well integrity is the same, he thought. If a company spends the time and uses tools to determine if a well is cemented, the well will be safer for the workers and have a much lower chance of contaminants coursing through tiny channels outside of the pipe, reaching the surface, or finding a way into a shallow drinking-water aquifer. “A channel doesn’t have to be very big to carry a lot of fluid; a finger is enough,” said Cooke.

The problem with a tool like Schlumberger’s isolation scanner is that it is so expensive. It is generally used only in the industry’s most challenging wells, if then. It relies on four transducers that emit high-energy pulses. The tool Cooke invented was simpler. It was a fancy thermometer. And as Cooke told me once by email, “Temperature measurements are cheap.” Because the tool is less expensive to manufacture, Cooke believes it could be widely deployed in the thousands of shale wells being drilled every year. Each could provide a measure of assurance that the well wouldn’t leak and leave behind an environmental mess.

The shortcomings with cement—both in deepwater wells and less complex onshore wells—are one of the industry’s best kept secrets. The industry talks regularly about the protection against dangerous blowouts and groundwater contamination that cementing wells provides. But cementing, despite huge technological improvements, remains an imperfect science. In an exhaustive report of the causes of the BP Deepwater Horizon offshore catastrophe, a national commission noted that “cementing an oil well is an inherently uncertain process. . . . Even following best practices, a cement crew can never be certain how a cement job at the bottom of the well is proceeding as it is pumped. Cement does its work literally miles away from the rig floor, and the crew has no direct way to see where it is, whether it is contaminated, or whether it has sealed off the well.” While it sets, the cement is exposed to extreme heat, pressure, and contaminants. Hairline seams can appear in the cement, or even larger finger-sized holes, that undermine cement effectiveness. The cementing crew is left with incomplete and indirect measurements. It can be like trying to determine someone’s gender by looking at his or her shadow through a telescope.

“Why doesn’t the oil industry pay more attention to cementing problems?” Cooke asked rhetorically during one of our meetings. “I answered my own question over a period of time: because it costs money to do it, and there is no pressure to do anything.”

Cooke was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, in the midst of an oil boom. Nearly everyone’s father worked for an oil company. His dad worked on wells for Magnolia Petroleum, a forerunner of today’s Exxon Mobil. Pride in the dangerous, tiring work passed from one generation to the next. Cooke recalled that in the small oil-field elementary school, if a kid made a disparaging remark about your father’s employer, there would likely be a fight. While his own father’s formal education stopped short of a high school diploma, Cooke’s mother had higher aspirations, first for herself and then for her son. She attended college and wanted a degree in chemistry, but her father didn’t believe that science was an acceptable profession for women. Settling for a teacher’s certificate, she poured her dreams into her son. From the time he was a little kid, Cooke said his mother told him, “You are going to get a PhD. You are going to have plenty of education.”

Cooke never strayed from the path his mother laid out for him. After attending Louisiana Tech University, he went to the University of Texas and earned his PhD in a field of physics that dealt with the interaction of molecules. Then he returned to the industry that dominated his youth. For three decades, he was a standout at Exxon’s research facility in Houston, a concentration of talented scientists who threw off innovations that helped transform a superstition-soaked industry from one that ran on hunches into one that embraced science to solve problems. When Cooke started work at the research center, in 1954, there were still wildcatters around who used witching twigs to find oil. By the time he left in 1986, the industry could send sound waves through thousands of feet of rock, process the bounced-back signals through some of the world’s fastest computers, and find oil. This technique was invented at Exxon’s research facility in Houston. “I spent thirty-two years there, and I enjoyed every day of it,” said Cooke.

Over the years, he made his share of innovations. One was the radial differential temperature logging tool. It looks like a long, skinny metallic pool cue that drillers lower into oil wells to figure out if the cement hidden away behind the pipes had set properly. It is a high-tech whirligig on the end of a long steel tube that spins in the well and can sense minute fluctuations in temperature that are telltale signs of water or gas flowing through cement. In most wells today, companies run what’s called a cement bond log. The CBL uses acoustic signals to “listen” to the pipes. Cement that has adhered to the outside of the pipe, creating a solid seal, makes a different sound from cement that has left even a microscopic gap. But a cement bond log can’t tell if there is a channel an inch or two away from the outside of the pipe where high-pressure gas is flowing. The cement bond log, said Cooke, gives drillers a false sense of confidence.

“What the industry says will determine whether or not a cement job is adequate, I don’t agree with. The industry says you run a cement bond log,” he said, banging his open palm on the table to punctuate the last three words. “They say if you get a good bond, you get a good cement job. That is not true. Not true.” Another two palm slaps. “You can have flow in the annulus, in channels, through the cement, or between the cement and the formation.” The cement bond log is a good test, he said. “It is necessary, but not sufficient as a mathematician would say.” The industry is fooling itself—and fooling the public, he believed. The industry needs to run better cement evaluation tools down wells. Think of it as preventative medicine, he said, to find problems before they spin out of control.

The government issued Exxon Patent 4,074,756 in 1977 for his invention. A series of field tests showed that it was better than a CBL at finding leaks. Cooke was canny. He didn’t pitch the tool to his Exxon bosses as a leak-detection device. Instead, the tool’s original purpose was to determine if the cement had created a good enough seal to keep oil production healthy. Not long after he had a working prototype, an Exxon colleague working on the sprawling King Ranch in South Texas called him. “There’s too much water in the well, and it’s choking off the oil flow,” his colleague said. “Get down here with that tool and figure out where the water is leaking into the well.” Another call came from an Exxon team in Germany. For a year, he went around the world with the tool, running it down Exxon wells. As the RDT was lowered into the well, the tool deployed two small prongs that pressed up against the inside of the well and then rotated in circles. This rotation gave a 360-degree view of what was hidden behind the pipe. Since a small channel of gas or water will create a slight fluctuation in the pipe’s temperature, he calibrated the tool to detect a difference of less than 0.01 degree Fahrenheit. “In many cases, I found flow behind casing, in some places where it had not been known. There was no other technique that would have detected it,” he recalled. With his RDT, he could accurately find leaks and shut them down by puncturing the well and squeezing in new cement.

After he demonstrated its usefulness and wrote up the results in a couple papers published by petroleum engineering groups, Cooke found a manufacturer. Within a few years, there were thousands of RDTs deployed all over the world. Then in 1988 the manufacturer fell on hard financial times and was acquired by Halliburton, a larger competitor. Halliburton decided to stop making the tool.

By that time, Cooke had moved on to other inventions. He developed and patented a ceramic bead that was stronger than sand and useful for fracking deep wells. This invention earned millions of dollars for Exxon. He also did important work on using vibrations to improve cement quality. In the 1980s he performed pioneering studies on how oil-well cement sets. Twenty years later, the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s lobbying powerhouse and the final word on drilling and building wells, issued new guidelines on how to cement wells. The document praised Cooke’s work, calling it a “revelation” and “one of the industry’s most important publications for the advancement of cementing technology.”

He left Exxon after earning a law degree at night and began his second career as a patent attorney. He worked for Baker Botts, a white-shoe law firm, for a decade and then cofounded another energy-focused law firm. In 2011 he left behind the long hours of supervising dozens of lawyers and set up a small patent law practice in Conroe. He remains a wiry and energetic man. Despite two decades practicing law, he remains at heart a scientist. “It’s like your first girlfriend. You never quite get over her,” he said. “I was trained as a scientist. I was looking at the science of wells. What is the data regarding sealing of wells. All the data that I have says cement is not a reliable seal.” If the scientist in him realized there was a problem, it was more a sociological bent that got him wondering why this problem hadn’t been fixed—and why his radial differential temperature tool, or one similar to it, wasn’t a staple in the industry’s toolbox.