Home Improvement

I did it with a grant from the Natural Resource Conservation Service. They pay 75% but in the case of a well you don't know what it's going to cost so their geologists just estimate what they think the well will cost and they pay 75% of that and if it's more than that you're on your own but if it's less you can actually get it for free. Their cost share came out to about $14,000. About 300 yards from where we were drilling a neighboring property has a well that is 255 feet deep so I'm hoping we can hit that same water. At $50 a foot that's $12,750 so hey, free well.

The well driller came out and started. At about 100 feet they hit water and say it's about 4 gallons per minute. We are hoping for 11 but we can probably make it work with 8 or 9. Not 4 though so keep going. I tell him about the well over the fence and he says "W'e'll hope for that". Our neighbor came by and so we're sitting there bullshitting and watching them put joint after joint down the hole. After a while I go ask how it's going and he says "We're at 480 feet and nothing yet". So much for the free well. After a couple more hours they say they're at 580 feet and there's water there but it's pumping as much sand as water so he needs a different machine to keep going deeper. They're going to call it a day and he's going to research wells in the area to see where we might hit water. Now we're at $29k and counting.

Did I mention that we're in the middle of the worst drought in 30 years and hay prices (which is our biggest annual expense) have quadrupled? Not the year to be spending a lot of money on other things.

Later that night the driller calls me and says a lot of wells in the area are 900-1000 feet deep and they are 200 feet lower in elevation that where we're drilling so we could easily be looking at 1200 feet or more. Then he tells me that they can deal with the sand by drilling the hole out bigger and then packing gravel around the outside of the well casing to filter out the sand. He said it's hard to tell but he thought we might get 9 gpm out of that. "No guarantees, but I'm 90% sure I can make a well out of it that way." The price will go up to $55 a foot though. In the morning I called the NRCS engineers and they thought it was a reasonable thing to try so we go ahead with the gravel pack. This is Friday and it takes them all day to drill out the well and get the casing in. I went by there about 7pm and they were just starting to put in the gravel pack. They said it would definitely be Monday before they could tell me what we had. Now it's at $32,000 which is not a disaster but much worse than what I was hoping and we don't know if it's going to be enough water or not.

I worry about it all weekend and then on Sunday night the driller calls me and says "Hey we did an air test on that well before we left on Friday and it didn't look like it was going to make much water. We won't know for sure until we can do a better test on Monday but I want you to think about what you're going to do if it doesn't work." He said the options were to try again in another place (where there would also be no guarantees) or go to 1400 feet. BTW if you go to 1400 feet it's hard to drill that deep so the price goes up to $100 a foot. Also he said that having a well that deep is not desirable. The electric bills will be through the roof and the pumps will be expensive and burn out often. Also having them come out and pull 800+ feet of pipe every time you need a new pump won't be cheap. Also the water might come out hot from being so far down which is not a good thing for cattle. $140K for a bad well is not appealing. In the mean time we had also talked to a neighbor 5 miles north of us who recently drilled a 1200 foot well and it cost $100K so it's not an unrealistic possibility. On the other hand, the NRCS doesn't cost share dry holes so if we drill elsewhere (and the options are very limited because there aren't a lot of power lines on our place) I'm paying the full $32K for a hole that's going to get filled back in and we still need a well.

Monday morning I was going to Billings with my girlfriend to go to Costco and do some other shopping so my Mom is going to go out and monitor the drilling. At about 10:00 she texted that they were bailing it at 10gpm. Later they did a pump test and it made 12gpm for 24 hours so we had our well. Never been more happy for something that "only" cost $20,000 more than I had hoped for. We have 3 more wells to drill on this project though and I don't know if my heart can take it. Embarking on a project that might cost $5k and might cost $100k is not that enjoyable.