A Day At “Work”

So…

Yesterday at work, my company was hired to complete borehole geophysics of a newly drilled well in northwestern New Jersey. My company gets jobs like this pretty infrequently, and it’s always a treat because it’s a little more geology-oriented than some of our other work like utility locating. For the record, I do enjoy the detective work of finding buried lines. But there’s just something special about borehole geophysics that makes it an exciting work day.

Water wells typically have static water level below ground surface. Not this one! This bad boy is an artesian well, meaning it’s under constant pressure and the only way out is up. It flows at 300 gallons per minute! A simple way to think about it, is that it fills an orange Home Depot bucket every second. It was a gusher!

Our client wanted two pieces of information. Diameter of the open borehole with depth (when wells are drilled, the diameter typically is increased at faults, fractures, water-bearing zones, etc.) and borehole deviation (is the hole straight down, or did it “wander” as it was being drilled?). We used a 3-arm caliper tool for the diameter, and an optical televiewer tool for the deviation.

This well had a total depth of 467 feet below ground surface. Several fracture zones, some massive, were identified. Very cool stuff!

During our lunch break, we took a 30-second walk down to the Delaware River. The shoreline was a beautiful outcrop of the Passaic formation, reddish-brown shales and siltstones. Even a modest waterfall was flowing into the river. An exciting work day, in a beautiful part of New Jersey. And the icing on the cake… sunny and 70° weather. There’s a saying - “If you love your job, you will never work a day in your life”… this day felt like that.