Oil wells should be named after the many branches of Nassau OTB that produced money
And where people worked while others dreamed of casinos, slot machines, and FIFA like deals.
NYC OTB , now dead and bankrupt, should be memorialized with wells named after it.
Michael Bloomberg will throw the party for naming that which he wanted dead!
The NYC board of elections will live forever and is unfit to have a well named after it
Oil Wells Yield a Gusher of Goofy Names
Monikers include Porky Pig, Ron Burgundy; ‘Always good for a laugh’
A Bakken shale oil drilling site sports unconventional well names outside a rural hamlet in northwestern North Dakota. PHOTO: CHESTER DAWSON/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
AMBROSE, N.D.—How well an oil well is named is an afterthought for many companies, but for others it is an obsession.
Ron Burgundy, Dean Wormer and Ty Webb have all taken on new lives. The three—characters in “Anchorman,” “Animal House” and “Caddyshack”—share a unique tribute in rural North Dakota, where shale oil wells have been named after them.
A drilling rig
As drilling sites proliferate in places like North Dakota’s Bakken Shale formation, naming them has become something of a game for energy firms looking for a way to distinguish their oil fields.
Denver-based Emerald Oil Inc. uses movie characters such as Joel Goodsen from “Risky Business” and Dr. Egon Spengler from “Ghostbusters” to organize its hydraulically fractured, or fracked, wells.
“It’s always good for a laugh when you’re doing a dry presentation about oil and gas well economics with a group of investors. Everyone likes to talk about a well with a good name,” said Emerald Chief Executive McAndrew Rudisill.
His favorites? “Randolph and Mortimer Duke from ‘Trading Places’.”
Every well drilled, or spudded, must have its own name from the time a permit application is filed with regulators. There are few rules guiding naming, so monikers tend toward the mundane and prosaic. Most spud names are duds when it comes to originality.
The vast majority of operators group wells by the surname of the land owner or local geographical landmarks. Some of the biggest Bakken oil producers, including Oasis Petroleum Inc., stick with surnames and strings of hyphenated numbers.
“We like to keep it simple,” says Taylor Reid, Oasis Petroleum’s president.
Other wildcatters like to get creative.
Tulsa, Okla.-based Samson Resources Corp. has pairs of wells tapping into North Dakota’s Bakken formation named after classic Detroit cars, including Stingray, Charger, Comet and Bel Air. Denver-based SM Energy Co. named its wells Elway, Manning and Davis, inspired by last names of Broncos football stars.
Enerplus Corp., with some 700 Bakken wells, has one of the most colorful lists of names. Its inventory includes well pairs named after planets (Mars and Pluto), chili peppers (habanero and poblano) and bicycle manufacturers (Huffy and Schwinn.)
The company often picks taxonomic terms such as species of cactus, fish or birds of prey to group its wells on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in western North Dakota.
Not all the animals are native to the high prairie.
“A number of them we concocted at lunch,” said Bob Larson, a senior engineer with Enerplus. “I think the marsupials group was an after-dinner libation thing.”
That unusual naming system predates the Bakken Shale oil boom in North Dakota, which took off six years ago. Halliburton and Dallas-based Lyco Energy Corp., which Enerplus bought in 2005, drilled a number of wells in an area of Eastern Montana with few towns or obvious topographical references.
Mr. Larson and his colleagues chose cartoon characters such as Foghorn Leghorn, Porky Pig and Snidely Whiplash. One well drilled in 2001 about 18 miles northwest of Sidney, Mont., was christened Bullwinkle.
These names rarely, if ever, appear in marketing materials nor are they used to brand barrels of oil from a particular well site. They’re considered to be something of an inside joke for industry watchers, who can find them in public databases or listed in trade publications that track new well permit issuance.
Rice Energy Inc., a Midwestern shale gas operator based in Pennsylvania, is known for naming wells after monster trucks such as Bigfoot, Dragon’s Breath and Krazy Train as well as characters such as Batman, Robin and Zorro. A disclosure on the company’s website notes: “Despite their size and strength, our wells are in no manner affiliated with such superheroes or monster trucks.”
Offshore drilling means there are no landowners, so companies must look elsewhere for names.
Royal Dutch Shell recently named one of its Gulf of Mexico wells “Power Nap.” The infamous Macondo well involved in BP PLC’s massive 2010 Gulf spill was named after an ill-fated town in a Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez novel. It was chosen as part of an internal contest to benefit the United Way.
In North Dakota, well names must be posted on signboards at well sites and are listed in public records of drilling permits published by the state. States officials say they have no rules about naming conventions, but have yet to receive an application with a questionable name.
“We would probably ask an operator to reconsider a well name if it were really something horrible” like a four-letter word, said Alison Ritter, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Mineral Resources.
Sometimes a bon mot turns into a public spectacle.
A frack job near Tioga, N.D., suffered a blow out in May of last year, spewing wastewater before being brought back under control. That volatile well’s name? Ron Burgundy.
The incident triggered blowback from at least one North Dakota lawmaker, who found that name undignified and urged companies to be more careful when considering names, said Ms. Ritter. “He said it’s not as funny when a serious issue arises.”
The Ron Burgundy well was sold in September to Denver-based Liberty Resources LLC, which has no plans to rename the well. It also doesn’t plan to add any fellow cast members to its well inventory.
“There’s no business reason to change it,” said Liberty’s president C. Mark Pearson. “But it’s safe to say we won’t be naming any more wells Ron Burgundy. He was the weather guy, right?”
The policy at Whiting Petroleum Corp., the largest operator in the Bakken, is to use the names of mineral rights royalty or surface land owners. When that isn’t an option, the company often employs the name of a local ranch, township or geographic landmark. Just never a work of fiction.
Whiting’s chairman, James Volker, says that is standard practice, but he doesn’t have a problem with others choosing wacky well names. “Early on in my career, I worked with a partner who used to like to paint smiley faces on the [oil well] tanks. I went along with that, so I’m fine with anything.”
Write to Chester Dawson at chester.dawson@wsj.com
