Luis Martinez has been working in the oil fields since he graduated from high school, first following his uncle to the North Dakota boom.

His mother, Delia Diaz Santos, thinks she knows why he was drawn to the same field as his father, his father’s brothers and other family members.

“I think it’s in his blood,” she said. 

But the Cody man is not just following in the family tradition, he’s making history and setting drilling records.

It helped that he was able to be in at the ground floor of a new drilling rig set in Northeastern Colorado.

Martinez, his crew and the three other True Drilling crews assigned to the new rig had the chance to do something unusual — they were able to fabricate modifications to the rig to maximize how efficiently, and safely, the crews could work. 

Still, new rigs aren’t known for being fast drillers, so for the first few months the crews settled into the routine of drilling, rotating through shifts to keep it running 24/7 in the DJ basin of Weld County, Colorado.

“I don’t think anyone expected the rig to perform,” Martinez said. 

But, he said thanks to the work of dedicated, experienced crew members, the rig performed so well that last summer the rig broke a record, drilling 11,044 feet in a 24-hour period. 

“It’s pretty uncommon for a brand new rig to perform well right out of the box,” said Bill DeGraeve, True Drilling’s chief operating officer and director of drilling. “The companionship, harmony of the crews — they performed really well.”

Last November they broke that record twice, and just last shift — Martinez works two weeks on, two weeks off — they once again broke the drilling record twice. 

“Down in the DJ is fast drilling and a lot of it is the experienced hands out there,” Martinez said. “We have a lot of experienced guys and they’re setting the standard. All four crews perform.”

Martinez has been working in the oil fields since right after graduating from high school, when he went to work with his uncle in the Bakken Oil Fields in North Dakota. After going to the University of Wyoming for a year with the intention of being a petroleum engineer, the call of the Bakken was too strong and he went back. It paid off: Before long he was able to buy a house in Cody. 

“I’ve been through the ups and downs and my family has been in it too,” he said. 

Right now the work is steady, he said, and he’s enjoyed the move to True Drilling. 

True Drilling was established in 1948 as True and Brown Drilling Contractors and would later become True Drilling LLC. True Drilling has worked primarily in oil fields all over the region, but also on a national and global scale with a couple of short-lived projects in Honduras and Hawaii.  

The rig Martinez is on — Rig 41 — is one of only 15 oil and gas rigs drilling in Colorado, but with new technology the rig can do much more than one even a decade ago. 

“One rig can drill 3-4 times that amount of wells as we used to be able to do,” said Dave Terrill, drilling superintendent. “Ten years ago it would have taken 30 days to drill a single well, now we’re drilling wells with 2 mile laterals in under five days. It’s pretty incredible. With the technology, and great employees we can reduce that time.”

And they do the work without incident — recently True Drilling finished the first quarter of the year 2024 accident free and DeGraeve said safety is of key importance in a job where there is a lot of exposure to risk. 

Martinez credited both the success and safety of the rig to True Drilling setting up experienced crews who start every 12 1/2 hour shift with a half hour safety meeting. 

The rigs run 24/7, so by the time this story is printed the rig may have broken yet another record as it continues to drill a 22 well pad. 

“If we drill a well every five days, we have drilled almost 200 wells in a three year period,” DeGraeve said. “We have now drilled over 1 million feet of well bore with this operator.”

Terrill said the rig will drill in northern Colorado for three years before the wells are turned over to Chevron, which will then get five to 15 years of production. 

“We’re setting them up for a long history,” DeGraeve said. 

And Martinez is prepared to make some more history. 

“The first time was really cool, now we just want to see how far we can go,” he said.