Excerpt from Mud-Laden Fluid Applied to Well Drilling One of the greatest wastes of natural gas is that which often takes place in drilling oil wells. If a well is being drilled by one of the usual methods, the gas becomes a hindrance to drilling, and the driller regards it as a nuisance; or the gas may be found in a field where it has little or no immediate commercial value, and hence is allowed to escape into the air without restraint. For preventing this waste the usual dry-hole methods of drilling are unsuitable, and it is the purpose of this paper to outline a method whereby wells may be drilled and the oil recovered without waste of gas. When an open hole is bored into a bed containing gas under pres sure, the gas flows toward the hole because of the reduction of pres sure at the hole. The movement of gas is therefore always from a greater to a lesser pressure. If some means be provided for keeping the pressure within the well greater than the pressure in the gas sand there will be no flow of gas into the well. The requisite pres sure may be obtained by a column of water in the well, provided the gas pressure be not greater than that of the water when the well is full. However, the use of clear water is sometimes impracticable and is always undesirable. The action of clear water on the walls of the well causes caving, and an attempt to use clear water in drilling the well invites trouble and may injure the producing sands. By mixing clay with the water the results obtained are entirely different, and this paper deals with the use of a mud-laden fluid as applied to the dry-hole method of drilling with a cable rig, one type of which is shown in figure 1. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.