holding on comes easy- to me!

That's why I am still holding.
I like the excitement of the drilling going deeper and deeper till TD is reached. Honestly, I have never yet known a drilling to be ahead or on time without encountering problems. Often drilling is delayed, even stopped while further tests are taken. All this is 'murder' for investors that can't accept the pressure of delays...and sell up.

http://www.encapgroup.com/drilling/
Drilling continues in stages: They drill, then run and cement new casings, then drill again. When the rock cuttings from the mud reveal the oil sand from the reservoir rock, they may have reached the final depth. At this point, they remove the drilling apparatus from the hole and perform several tests to confirm this finding:

Well logging - lowering electrical and gas sensors into the hole to take measurements of the rock formations there
Drill-stem testing - lowering a device into the hole to measure the pressures, which will reveal whether reservoir rock has been reached
Core samples - taking samples of rock to look for characteristics of reservoir rock
Blowouts and Fires
In the movies, you see oil gushing (a blowout), and perhaps even a fire, when drillers reach the final depth. These are actually dangerous conditions, and are (hopefully) prevented by the blowout preventer and the pressure of the drilling mud. In most wells, the oil flow must be started by acidizing or fracturing the well.
Once they have reached the final depth, the crew completes the well to allow oil to flow into the casing in a controlled manner. First, they lower a perforating gun into the well to the production depth. The gun has explosive charges to create holes in the casing through which oil can flow. After the casing has been perforated, they run a small-diameter pipe (tubing) into the hole as a conduit for oil and gas to flow up the well. A device called a packer is run down the outside of the tubing. When the packer is set at the production level, it is expanded to form a seal around the outside of the tubing. Finally, they connect a multi-valved structure called a Christmas tree to the top of the tubing and cement it to the top of the casing. The Christmas tree allows them to control the flow of oil from the well.

In Georgia, Range are currently encountering 'hard bedrock' which may be subvolcanic or basement granite. This is not a new challenge, it's been done before, and I believe they are on course to repeat what the Russians achieved off-shore Vietnam in 2005 !

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?148918-Endless-Oil-!!-Oil-Revisionists-say-so

In the quiet waters off the coast of Vietnam lies an area known as Bach Ho, or White Tiger Field. There, and in the nearby Black Bear and Black Lion fields, exploration companies are DRILLING MORE THAN A MILE INTO SOLID GRANITE--so-called basement rock--for oil. That's a puzzle: Oil isn't supposed to be found in basement rock, which never rose near the surface of the earth where ancient plants grew and dinosaurs walked. Yet oil is there. Last year the White Tiger Field and nearby areas produced 338,000 barrels per day, and they are estimated to hold about 600 million barrels more.

Oil and natural gas are being found in places no one expected and in greater quantities than anticipated just a decade ago. In the mid-1990s the world's reserves of oil were thought to total about 890 billion barrels. Today reserves stand at 1.1 trillion barrels; the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that continued reserve growth, along with undiscovered resources, could bring world oil estimates to as much as three trillion barrels. "We're finding there are pretty substantial oil reserves in the world," says Tom Ahlbrandt, world energy project chief at the USGS. "New exploration and drilling technologies are making major new discoveries possible."

http://abundance.org.uk/oil-in-bedrock-granite

The Russians were confident they would succeed where Western countries failed. Why? Armed with what has become known as the Russian-Ukrainian theory of the deep, abiotic origin of petroleum, the Russians planned to find oil where traditionally trained “fossil-fuel” petro-geologists had failed to look. So, in 1981 the Russians teamed up with the Vietnamese to form a joint venture oil company named Vietsovpetro (PetroVietnam). Together they headed into the South China Sea off Vietnam and drilled deep wells into the crystalline basement structure of the sea bottom.