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!

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.

DDs

Here is a quick briefing on directional drillers (read about the ones I'm working with in the post below).

I am a Measurements While Drilling Engineer (MWD), or a Logging While Drilling (LWD) Engineer (although technically both). I am in charge of tools that take the measurements to tell us what where drilling through, and what direction we're drilling in, the former being the Logging and the latter being the Measurements parts of my job description.

Directional Drillers (DDs) are in charge of the tools that take us in the direction that we want to go and are also in charge of making sure that we go that way.

It is fairly common for an MWD Engineer to "cross over" to the DD side, since DDs make about twice as much as we do. In fact, DDs have probably some of the highest salaries for the least necessary education I have ever heard of. I once worked with a DD in Arkansas that had a 2ND GRADE EDUCATION and made somewhere in the ballpark of $300,000/year before taxes. He had advanced from Roustabout (the bottom of the drilling operations totem pole), to Rig hand, to Driller (he operates all the machinery on the rig), to DD from the age of 17 to 40-something.

So, there you have it. Just so you know what I'm working with...