Whoopee!

Oh my goodness. After almost 24 straight hours of some pretty heavy-duty work, I got to go home early! No one else was ready, so I got to take the helicopter allllll by myself. I felt like I was a celebrity being escorted someplace super secret.

But this marks the beginning of my days off. I need them. I am sooooo tired of working right now that I am perfectly happy here, watching a Project Runway marathon on a friend's tivo.

So while you wait for my next post, here's a picture of the drill bit that we pulled out of the hole this morning. Enjoy!

A related question

Recently I received a question from my friend Samantha, who was on my study abroad program in Cyprus and now works as a Study Abroad Adviser at SUNY:

Do you work with many other young people on the rigs? What is social life like?

As for people my age, there are a number of them. The lowest positions on the totem pole, "roustabouts", generally hire recent high school graduates or drop-outs. The less ambitious of these will get promoted to "roughneck" eventually and remain there for decades. The more advanced positions of drillers, directional drillers, and company men tend to be held by older and older men as they go higher and higher (yes, men. I have only ever met one female directional driller, but that was socially and not through work). But overall on the rig there is a great variety of ages, from 16 to 70 and everywhere in between.

Regarding the social life, for me it kind of "is and it isn't". I don't have the sort of schedule that lends well to making friends normally or dating, especially. But there are about 150 other field engineers in my office in Louisiana who are mostly my age group and are in the same predicament, so there's always someone in town to hang out with and commiserate on the craziness of the job when I do get home.

Sometimes I do make new friends when I'm in Lafayette during my days off. I did some volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity back in August when I was waiting around for this job to start. It would have been a good way to get acquainted with non-oilfield people (a first!), but then I spent the next four weeks offshore, my two weeks away from the rig mostly in Boston, the next five weeks offshore again, and I'm intending to spend the next week up in Boston for Thanksgiving, so any potential friends I could have made would barely remember me by the time I was in Lafayette again for more than 36 hours.

Does it get lonely? Occasionally. Does it bother me? Rarely. I know it's not a permanent situation, and I have the internet to keep me in contact with all the friendships I'd like to maintain. What more could a girl ask for?

Question on Bonding

Today Hanna asked:

So being confined with a bunch of people for a few weeks can be seen as a bonding experience in some situations. Is that the case for working on an oil rig? - do you make friends and hang out and feel close to the people you're with? Or do you just interact purely on a professional level, then hide away in your room on your own at nights to relax, and then after a few weeks you go off to the next rig and forget about the people at the previous one?

By nature I'm rather aloof when in a professional setting, so I tend towards the latter. My usual routine involves waking up, heading to the gym for 30 minutes or so (depending on how late I sleep), attending the evening meeting at 5:30 , eating dinner, starting my shift at 6pm, working till 6am, giving notes to my day hand and chatting about stuff until 6:30, then eating breakfast and going to bed right away. Unless they're doing noisy construction in the living quarters, it's shockingly easy to sleep for 10 hours or more a day.

I eat alone more often than not, but when I do eat with other people our conversation tends towards the job. I'm friendly around the rig, and I'm always quick with a "Hi!" or "Good morning!" (it works both when I wake up and go to bed!), but I rarely get into a personal conversation with a rig hand that goes deeper than "where I'm from" and "what the heck I'm doing in Louisiana".

All exceptions to this generality are with my fellow MWD/LWD Engineers. We're all crammed together in our little steel box which predicates just such an idea, although with me it's still rare. I've hammered out a couple of pretty solid friendships over the stresses of a job, but in most cases I'll merely develop a slightly deeper understanding of my coworker, thus making it easier to converse with them at office parties, but not compelling me to invite them over to my house for a beer. We'll get a small sort of "comrade in arms" bond, but nothing particularly strong.

There is of course the other extreme, which hasn't happened to me (yet) since I try to keep the peace. But I have known countless occasions when a pair of engineers, after spending one or two volatile weeks on the same rig, will never want to see each other again -- it's a hazard of the close quarters.

There was one occasion when I thought a job might actually ruin a good friendship between myself and a girl named Margarita. Margarita is a really friendly, upbeat person, and we got along well whenever I saw her in social situations from the start. She chose me to be a part of her cell back in April, and we worked on the same rig off-and-on for a period of about 6 weeks.

While working together, I was dismayed when it seemed that she was extra-critical of my work and would blow up at the smallest misstep I made. I was inwardly seething at this treatment, and was having a difficult time maintaining my civility with her. Then one day I couldn't take it any more, and when I brought up my concerns we both burst into a very teary reconciliation, embraced each other strongly, and sniffled our way back into perfect friendship. All in front of the very male, and very uncomfortable, directional drillers.

I hope that answers your question! So who's next?

Act NOW before it's too late!!!

I WANT YOU!

I want you, my dear readers, to submit your questions about oilfield life, oilfield work, and my life in general in response to this post. I have 5 days left before I leave the rig for my self-determined Thanksgiving break, and I will do my best to answer any and all questions as thoroughly as possible between now and then.

You see, I came to a small sort of epiphany during my last break. I was up in Boston, visiting friends and family, but I was unable to completely relax. I still felt the weight of my job pushing me down, even though I was on "official" vacation, and should have been able to release those feelings. But they kept pressing on me, and I eventually realized it was because everyone was so curious about what I was doing, I kept fielding questions and going into long, detailed descriptions about all the facets of my life and work. After four straight weeks on the rig, this was like reliving a traumatic episode again, and again, and again (although far less serious than actual trauma -- my job isn't that bad).

But I was unable to let go of the constant weight of my work, and was therefore unable to fully enjoy my vacation. So during this upcoming holiday, I am going to do my best to promote my own peace of mind by saying "NO!". I am NOT going to answer any questions about my job, I am NOT going to go into drawn-out explanations of what it's like for a woman to live on a floating steel island with 150 men, and I am not going to discuss the technologies I utilize to help oil companies find their prize. So apologies in advance to everyone who might want to pepper me with questions over turkey and cranberry sauce, but I'm not gonna do it this time.

To make it up to you, however, I will devote this next week to answering all of your questions through this blog so that you may satisfy your curiosity in advance. Whoever feels so inclined may either post a comment to this post or email me in person to submit their query. I am scheduled to leave the rig on Tuesday morning, so hurry up and start asking away!

And remember: once I step off that helicopter, I will pretend I no longer work in the oilfield. If you ask me to my face how my job is going, you just might receive a confused look and "what job?" for an answer. Any questions posed online will then be put aside until I've had time to decompress.

A lot of money.... for what, really?

Good news: we finished drilling today! Just as I was waking up at 4:15pm, the rig reached their revised Target Depth (of 300 ft past yesterday's depth, just past a total of 31,500 feet of hole.

And guess what we found? Nothing! Unfortunately for the oil company, there was no pay zone found in this well. The poor guys were quite disappointed since they were expecting a nice big oil reservoir.

But this billion dollar+ operation won't be for naught. They will run some wireline logging tools into the freshly drilled hole to better develop their models for what kind of stuff is actually down there, and specifically, where the oil is. This should make their next well in this area much more efficient and hopefully more successful.

For those curious, Wireline logging is the technological predecessor to Logging While Drilling. We use the same sorts of techniques, but their tools are smaller and are simply dropped down the hole at the end of a wire instead of attached to the entire drilling assembly like ours are. Pluses of Wireline: the conditions that the tools are run in mean that there's more flexibility in tool design, so they are able to perform much more complex measurements than we can. Minuses: the rig must shut down and have nothing else in the hole while running Wireline, and you can't get the data simultaneously while drilling like you can with us.

My company was founded by Wireline loggers, however (since Logging While Drilling didn't exist back then), so it's the "darling" segment of our corporate executives.

So now I wait. I sit at my laptop, alternately updating paperwork and watching movies until my tools are out of the hole and I can start doing real work. I've spent the past 3 hours doing some particularly befuddling paperwork, so I think it's time to sit back and finish the "Die Hard" marathon I started yesterday. I was most of the way through #3 (Die Hard With a Vengeance) when they just had to go back to drilling again. How frustrating!

Short on Tea and Patience

Today marks week four of my current hitch.

I am three days away from setting a personal record in number of consecutive days offshore. I am two days away from reaching 150 offshore days this year. I am a week away from my scheduled departure date.

A few days ago I had no scheduled departure date. When people asked me how long I was out here for, I'd blithely reply "When we're done drilling!". But now the problem is that nobody seems to know when or where that will be. Various estimates include: 2500 feet deeper, 1000 feet deeper, 300 feet deeper, and yesterday. In the meantime we're "Waiting on Weather" due to rough seas, and not drilling.

After a bunch of back-and-forth on prospective plans -- one possibility is to fill the last 15000 feet we drilled and kick off at an earlier point to do a sidetrack well -- I decided that enough was enough and I was going to go home at the five week mark. I've already got my relief lined up and I'm making plans to be home for Thanksgiving.

I had planned on using this hitch to learn as much as possible about nuclear operations. As it turned out, I learned some (not quite enough), and now I'm running out of energy to process all of this into retrievable memory in my brain. I have been on two jobs before where I got to see all the preparation in running a nuclear tool: programming the tool, loading the source, starting data acquisition at surface, but both times I was sent home before we got very far. I've never seen a complete nuclear run. And I'm never going to get my next promotion until I do.

But there's only so much that a person can take.

My longest hitch ever was 6 weeks in Wyoming. Just under a year ago, I spent Thanksgiving on a rig in the middle of some sandy mountains. But while there I was able to take a couple day trips to the tiny little towns that were within a reasonable driving distance, so it never really felt like a full 6 weeks of work. Comparing the length of a hitch on land to the length of a hitch offshore is like comparing apples to oranges. There is no comparison.

My cell manager's longest hitch offshore was 75 days. He was hired about 5 years ago when things seemed a lot less pleasant for people in our job. His first year alone he had more than 260 rig days. I can't even fathom that.

But now I cannot help keeping a running countdown till my estimated departure date. No matter how I try to avoid thinking about it, my brain is always tracking the days now that it's set. Depending on the drilling plans, we might even leave earlier due to finishing the well -- but I can't depend on that so I'm trying not to even consider it. Regardless, I'm leaving no later than Tuesday. For now I'm running out of tea, so it's going to be enough of a hardship to have to ration my supplies.

Until then...

New Feature! Yay!

Look! Over there! Do you see it?

Here's a hint: look left (and if you're reading this post a long time from now, look waaayyyy up and left).

It's a new feature! I've added a little text box wherein I will keep track of my vegetable intake on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Now you can all know exactly how poorly I'm doing at sticking to my resolution.

I'll try to make sure I update it at the end of each day, but alas I'm sure I won't always pull through. But I will faithfully tally my veggies, so you can be assured of no false reporting regardless of how infrequent I may be.

But I have a few caveats:

• Tomatoes count (just like how Pluto will always be a planet to me, tomatoes remain a vegetable).
• Olives count (sooooo not fruity, but I don't eat them that often anyway)
• Please don't get too worried if my counts are low. Some days I get so time-confused, I eat breakfast twice. And I DON'T eat vegetables with breakfast, sorry.

There you have it. Enjoy!

Keep on Truckin'

Shortly after deciding not to evacuate for Hurricane Ida, the higher-ups made another gutsy decision. They decided we were going to drill during Ida as well!!

When we first reached the bottom of the hole (it took a while, being >25,000 ft deep) we made our first attempt to drill. After about thirty minutes of bouncing up and down and twisting the drill string back and forth in the rough seas they called "pause" for to wait on better weather.

Six hours later they were back on bottom, drilling ahead, and having such ridiculous fluctuations because of the still-raging seas that I was stressing out to no end over my data. When training to become a Measurements/Logging While Drilling Engineer, there is one phrase that they hammer into as if it's our religious doctrine.

"What is our most important measurement?" says the instructor

"Depth!" reply the dozens of students in perfect unison.

Without a good depth measurement, all our other measurements (surveys, formation information) are virtually meaningless. Hey, it's great if you see a pay zone on the logs, but what's the point of logging it if you don't know where it is?

Due to the rig heave we were had to keep manually changing our depth to the point where I practically abandoned any further attempts to stay accurate. Who knew where we were? Our logs were a mess, since we'd drill a couple feet normally and then shoot ahead almost ten feet so fast our sensors didn't record any info in the interval.

But eventually we got ourselves on track. And then, eventually the weather calmed down. In retrospect it seems like they definitely made the right decision by not evacuating, since they saved a few million dollars and drilled a good 1500 feet that we otherwise wouldn't have.

We've got a long way to go as yet. Of all our previous drilling runs, we made no more than 5000 feet of new hole in one go, and they're attempting to finish the last 7000 feet in one shot this time. This is an ambitious move. The hole is deep, the formation is tight, and there's a lot that could go wrong. We got stuck already once today for a brief moment, but they were able to jar the drilling assembly out of it quickly to everyone's relief.

With a nuclear source in the hole, nobody wants to get stuck. My company runs some of the only tools in the Gulf of Mexico that enable you to fish the source out while the tools are still in the hole, but at almost 30,000 ft deep, there's no guarantee that we'd be able to fish it out successfully. If the source is stuck, the entire hole must be filled with red cement and a placard must be placed on the sea floor warning any future visitors (if fish can read) that there is radioactive material down below. Then there's a LOT of paperwork and the oil company has to eat the cost of the abandoned well.

So here we go. We're at 29,000 feet now, with a planned total depth of 33,700, so I'll be keeping my fingers crossed until then.

I'm a Vampire

I spent the past week NOT working the night shift. This was a near-unbearably painful experience for me.

Apparently I hate the sun. I enjoy coming to work just as it starts to sink over the horizon, catching the last glimmers of the darkening sky as I drink my English Breakfast tea after having eaten a breakfast likely consisting of baked chicken and cucumber salad.

I love the blackness of the world during my 12-hr shift. No matter how crazy and stressful things are inside my artificially lit logging unit, the world itself seems that much more peaceful and quiet outside when the sky is unlit.

I adore leaving work while it's still dark out -- I can pretend that it's 10 o'clock at night instead of 6 o'clock in the morning, and thus a reasonable time to go to bed. It's a race to make sure I can leave before the sunrise even begins so as to maintain the self-deception. This is now a lot harder after Daylight Savings, but is nothing compared to the challenges I've faced this past week.

I decided it would be a good idea to work a "split shift" of 12am-12pm so as to learn more about what it takes to be a nuclear cell manager (someone who can run a job involving nuclear tools). In retrospect I don't know why it seemed like a scheme that would work, since there was very little I wouldn't see on night shift that I would see in the daytime. The main difference between working nights vs. days is that the office is twenty times more likely to call up and ask questions or ask for favors during the day, but my cell manager fielded those calls without my help anyway.

Then there was the sun. With Hurricane Ida barreling through the gulf the clouds have kept it at bay lately, but earlier this week I would hiss in pain each time I walked outside to feel the skin-scorching rays hit my face in the daytime. I was almost surprised that I didn't actually start to smoke and crumble to ash like a real vampire (please forgive the oxymoron).

But my new roommate was the proverbial camel's straw. She's a petite Asian woman who works in the galley on the day shift, and spends about two hours each evening puttering around in the room before she goes to bed. For the past three nights she has proceeded to wake me up countless times between the hours of 6:30-9:30pm, and would only settle into the top bunk and turn off the light mere moments before my alarm would go off at 9:25.

So as of today I am switching back to the standard night shift. Hooray!

Batten Down the Hatches, Mateys!

Weather reports say that we'll be on the "dry" side of Tropical Storm Ida, with only 20-30 mph winds expected. The rig has spent the past 24 hours preparing for the worst, however, by storing or securing all loose objects on deck. There is always the worry of freak gusts or waves that might catch us unawares, so we've been strapping things down and tidying up just in case.

I love nautical terms, and can still enjoy them even when they seem to lose some of their novelty when you're actually at sea and their meanings are taken literally. My current trainee who hails from North Dakota (has anyone else ever met someone from North Dakota? Eric -- you don't count) had never heard the phrase "batten down the hatches" before so I explained it to him. Then I searched Google to make sure I had it correctly.

A "batten" is a strip of wood. A "hatch" is a door or portal. I had guessed the latter, but was interested to learn the former. So battening down the hatches is to secure planks across all the doors and windows on a ship in preparation for a storm. Our doors out here are rather secure, but we've had plenty of other objects that needed strapping down.

The company man prefaced his discussion for the need of this in a meeting with "Now I'm sure I'm not the only one in this room who has ridden out a hurricane on the rig." Perhaps it was my imagination, but his tanned and weather-beaten face seemed to show a far off look in his eyes and perhaps a hint of long forgotten fear. I shuddered after he spoke those words.

The heaving of the rig has been gradually increasing over the course of this day, and I find myself a touch excited to face the weather ahead. This is the thrill of imagined danger, like riding a roller coaster. All the safety precautions are in place, and I wouldn't be buckled into that seat if there was a chance I could be hurt. I'll fly through the loop-the-loops with the wind in my face, a scream in my throat, and in my heart the knowledge that this is all just for fun. I'll get off on the other side just as fine and dandy as when I stepped on, with a fun story to tell that will surely receive much embellishment.

So here we go now. The heaving's getting stronger and my internet connection won't last once the rain comes. I'll see you on the other side.

Update: As of late November 8th, Ida has been upgraded to the status of Hurricane.

On Second Thought...

Well, it seems like the head honchos back in Houston, TX have decided, in their meteorological expertise, that Tropical Storm Ida will be too weak to cause us any trouble when she comes our way.

So we're staying.

Now I was disappointed at first; I HATE it when someone says I might get to go home and then dashes all my hopes once I've just gotten them up. But I was able to quickly progress from indignation to stoic resignation to satisfied acceptance and even willingness to stay, since the longer I am offshore, the stronger my case for a nice long break after I finally DO get home.

And... dare I hope? A Thanksgiving with family?

Nope, nope, nope. Ignore the above. I don't want to jinx it.

Ready, Set, Wait for it....

For the past couple of days we've been preparing non-stop for our next drilling section. I've been filling out the paperwork for the nuclear source, getting all of our other pre-run documentation ready, programming the tools, prepping the computers, etc, etc.

As of yesterday morning at 10am we were all set and ready to go. It was just a matter of time before the rig let us know they were ready for us. And sure enough, at about 12:30 they told us we were going to pick up tools in 30 minutes.

5 minutes after that all plans were dropped.

Why? I'll show you why:


Tropical Storm Ida seems to be moseying up our way sometime early next week. People were already whispering "evacuation" last night, and next to leaving people on a rig during a hurricane/tropical storm, there's one thing you really don't want to do: leave a radioactive source in the hole during a hurricane/tropical storm.

Side note: I was once talking to a galley hand on another rig who told me this unbelievable story about his brother who worked on oil rigs in the 1980's. They hadn't fully evacuated the rig he was on by the time the storm came, and he and a good 20 other men were swept out to sea. They spent the next 21 hours barely staying afloat in the 30ft+ high waves until the hurricane passed and they were picked up by the coast guard. There was a class action lawsuit and this galley hand's brother never had to work again. I was a little bit skeptical until I saw the photos of his brother's 3 Hummers parked outside his mansion. But when you think about it, most safety regulations out here are on the books because of mistakes made in the past. That lawsuit ensured the oil companies would do all in their power to prevent that situation from ever happening again.

If an evacuation is called while drilling, the rig has to unlatch from the drilling assembly and the riser (a giant tube extending the depth of the sea and secured to the rig floor, protecting the drilling fluid and drilling assembly from the sea -- and vice versa), and leave the entire drilling assembly in the hole. It happens occasionally upon returning to the site after a hurricane that the well can no longer be found. No riser, no tools, nothing. This would be disastrous if a radioactive source were still in the hole.

To maintain productivity while they wait on a decision, the rig decided to go back to drilling with a drilling assembly made entirely of "dummy iron" -- no expensive electrical equipment or radioactive sources.

We'll probably find out about an evacuation once the offices in town have discussed it at their first morning meetings, so by 8 or 9am I'll probably have an answer. But a rig 40 miles south of us being run by the same oil company has already gotten their orders to evacuate, so I've got a hunch about what we're going to be doing tomorrow.

I'll be sitting here watching movies in the meantime.

Busy at Work

It has become my responsibility to prepare an updated version of the rig-up instruction manual for this rig. This document will hopefully be used by field engineers on future jobs out here, since they seem to enjoy having us do a full rig-up and rig-down of our equipment every 4 months or so on this rig. When I was working on rigging everything up back in September, they told me we probably wouldn't have to rig it down for 5 years if everything went well. But a different oil company will be leasing this rig on it's next well, and we have to clear on out.

The (very small) silver lining to this (enormous) cloud was that I got to take my camera around the rig and take lots of pictures that might otherwise be frowned upon in the "pursuit of service quality". In between snapping views of our cable wiring and sensor configurations, I got a few scenic shots as well.



First on the to-do list: ride the elevator up the derrick to check on our sensor WAAYYYY UP HIGGHHH.


It's hard to catch the perspective, but I'm reeeeallly high up.


See that drill pipe I'm looking down at? Those are each about 95 feet long. And the rig floor itself is about 85 feet above the water.


It makes for a great view!


But also a bit scary when looking down. Do you see that white box a little lower than left of center? That's the logging unit I spend 12 hours of my day in. It fits about three people and a good dozen computers relatively comfortably.


Between blogging and sleeping, I actually do have to work sometimes.


This is the kind of wiring that I get to document and record! Looks like fun, doesn't it?

In this blog I've written a few thousand words or so describing my life in the oilfield and the sort of work I perform. So I hope you enjoyed a few-thousand more condensed into picture form here, since there are some things about my job that words cannot begin to describe.