[Smokin' Joe]

While people commonly see what they want to, not all wells pump continuously, for starters. Some are on pump/recovery cycles which allow the well to equalize (refill) for a while, then resume pumping. (otherwise, the pump rate would exceed the rate of oil flow into the well and the motion would be wasted--as would the wear and tear on, and expense of running the pump). A good production hand will keep track of the refill rates and fluids produced for the well over its life and try to maintain an optimum rate of production with a minimum of salt water production, so the length of the recovery cycle may vary for any given well, and generally gets longer as the well depletes.

Failure to adjust the cycle can result in 'coning in' a well, to the point where it will only produce salt water, leaving a great deal of oil unproduced and unavailable to the wellbore (it ruins the well), or less than optimal production.

Your moments of observation may have coincided with the recovery part of the cycle, the differences may be attributable to the pumper changing the duration of the cycle in order to optimize production from an older well.

The only instance I know when price caused a slowdown in the rate of production was in 98/99. Lift costs exceeded the price of oil ($4.50/bbl for sour, $6.50/bbl for sweet crude in this area), and the Canadians were slowing their pump jacks down so they did not lose money faster.

[seemoAR]

I don’t normally see what I want to. I must be very lucky to see the pumps when they are in their off cycles. I understand what you are saying about having to turn the pumps off so they will not pump dry. I have a water well at my house. I did manage to pump it out one day and had to wait til it refilled.

I was working for a company that built gas stations in the early 1970’s. We had to change the pumps over because they wouldn’t register gas prices that were over $1.00. There were long lines at gas stations all over the country. The stations were running out of gas. We finished a station, called the distributer, and 24,000 gallons of gas was delivered in about 30 min.

I flew a little bit back then and noticed the floats were at the top of the crude oil storage tanks. They couldn’t be full of oil since there was an oil shortage. I guess they must have been full of air.