It's kind of a running joke when you work as a Drilling Engineer and the Directional Driller says they can't confirm their coordinates due to magnetic storms.
It's a reference to the "Armageddon" movie from 1998 when a bunch of oil rig drillers get recruited into being astronauts for plot reasons. It was a decent enough movie but nothing you need to look up unless you have an unhealthy obsession for Arwen from Lord Of The Rings.
I always felt that Armageddon occupied this uncanny valley of Hollywood cheese. Too much to suspend disbelief, not enough to be making fun of itself. Always loved "The Core" for being the same sort of film but falling into the second camp.
Don’t forget Deep Impact, sort of a summer companion blockbuster, but which “astronomers said was more accurate”, could feed your Hobbit obsessions, and NASA went on to name a space probe after it!
Negative - when directional drilling a well, a magnetic storm can actually cause you to lose signal and halt the entire drilling process. It's kind of a running joke when you work as a Drilling Engineer and the Directional Driller says they can't confirm their coordinates due to magnetic storms.
If I had to guess, I would say that Earth's magnetic field is used in directional drilling to tell which way your drill head is going and that the solar storm distorts Earth's magnetic field.
Off topic but whenever I see a blog with some 90s/2000s vibes, I always go to their first page of posts. Never disappoints to sneak a peak into that time capsule - including gwolf.org!
A typical "large" rig will need a 100m x 100m drill pad, roads to access which are often highly controlled during the design phase.
A drilling rig will remain on location for MAYBE 30-40 days if it is a deep well (2000m-7000m).
A completions rig (aka service rig) will come out afterwards to complete the well (install downhole equipment / frac / get the well ready for production).
Lease may be a bit bigger if large frac. Been a drilling engineer for 15+ years so haven't really seen too many fracs.
I don’t like oil drilling but even without your experience it’s clear GP’s assertion is nonsense. There are still oil wells all over Los Angeles in parking lots and tucked between buildings, which is a contradicting existence proof.
I can imagine in a big oil field like in Midland, TX they have a lot of sprawling operations that take up a lot of room. But that doesn’t have to be the only way.
Even the drill site in Beverly Hills on W. Pico is 2 acres. But the wildlife impact of drilling for oil in Beverly Hills is zero, whereas the wildlife impact of drilling for oil in the middle of nowhere is higher.
So 2-1/2 acres plus roads, instead of 5 acres, and you address how long, which OP didn't mention, in no way disputing him. Not a basis for leading with "incredibly false."
Windmill farms have roads also. Traveling in Illinois recently and seeing some huge 300+ft windmills in the corn and soybean fields, I think that is a perfect place for them. The whole scene is quite artificial and totally human controlled. The windmills fit right in. I don't think they should be placed on wilderness type lands. Similar to a fracking operation, you have a dense network of roads and the moving, man-made objects are quite jarring on the landscape. And unlike oil or gas extraction those sites will likely be in use for hundreds of years instead of a few decades.
My understanding is that East California is like that too. Not sure the status as of today and if this is still permitted or not? Look up some images from LA in the early oil boom - crazy.
In 2023 California almost halted drilling permits, but mainly because the governor has national office ambitions and he was starting to get some criticism from the hypocrisy of having overseen 10000+ new oil permits during his tenure.
