[21twelve]

“You still get all the core, ideally.”

Oh - duh! (On my part!) I only worked a couple of summers in the oil patch - we never did any coring. The geologist would get grab samples as the mud came back up. I’m guessing we must have been drilling in a field that was pretty well figured out? (This was back in the early 80’s).

[Smokin' Joe]

Coring was common up this way in the 70's and into the mid-80s. I had just broken out as a core hand (unusual for a guy who is and has worked most of his career as a geologist) when '86 happened and the oil patch went totally slack. So much for that job--which worked out, because coring hasn't regained the popularity it had back then.

Some companies still do it to find out more about the formation, but even that seems to be as much about the pressures needed to frac the rock as depositional environments and sedimentological data, which were critical in chasing field margins with vertical wells (complete hit or miss), but not as vital with horizontal ones where even less desirable wellbore might be fracced into better layers close by (10-20 ft., vertically).

There is more that can be gleaned from that cylinder of rock than ever, but it just isn't as common.

My first four wells we cut six cores (79-80). My last 20 wells (2015), we cut none, but the (last 20) horizontal wells and the speed with which they were drilled were the stuff of science fiction when I started in the oil patch.