On Wednesday I was informed that I would be leaving the rig once our tools were out of the hole. After that the rig was planning on running casing and they needed to get all non-essential personnel off the rig to make room. It's a pretty small rig, so bed space is a high commodity.
But first we had to unload our nuclear source, download the data from our tools, and process and send the logs to town. Wary of how late at night that would be, I went to take a nap with a promise from our lead hand that he would wake me up when they were ready to unload the source.
A short forty-five minutes later I was awakened from my semi-somnolent state by a knocking on my door. I opened it not to find my lead hand instructing me to don my coveralls and grab my dosimeter, but instead a pair of casing workers with bags in hand and looking to move into my still-warm bed.
"But you're supposed to be on the boat tonight!" was their response to my claim that I wasn't leaving until the next morning. "I can't go anywhere until my source is out of my tool!" It's a complicated and dangerous enough process unloading the source as it is -- it would be impossible with only one person.
What next ensued was an unpleasant confrontation in the Company Man's office where the Company Man claimed he told us to have three people ready for the evening boat, and our directional driller claiming he had already assured the Company Man we couldn't send anyone in until the tools were out of the hole.
We made a compromise to send the second directional driller and our third MWD hand in on the boat departing in fifteen minutes, and the rest of us would stay until the tools were out and ready to ship back to base. Unfortunately for them, both of those guys were sound asleep and had to be woken rather abruptly to pack and be ready to leave in record time.
As I was preparing to go back to bed to catch whatever sleep I could in anticipation of my red-eye work, another knock sounded on my door. It was the same casing hands saying they had been instructed to move into my room.
"You're not on the boat yet?"
No.
Seeing as how it's the only room on this rig that is appropriate for female use, I spent the next thirty minutes running all over the rig's offices again trying to track down the people who could fix the error.
In the end I got about thirty minutes of sleep before I was awoken by the third interruption of the night which was at last the wake-up call I had been expecting. Unloading the source went remarkably smoothly, as well as the processing and uploading of the data, and I was up until one o'clock in the morning checking off various to-do items that I was too conscientious to just leave until the morning (never have I learned the risks of procrastination better than on this job).
It turned out that the Company Man threw another fit that evening when he found out that (as per our agreement) we had only sent in two people on the boat. He ranted and raved and claimed we had agreed to send three, but no, that would have been impossible. I was glad to have missed that discussion.
After a refreshing four hours of sleep I relieved my lead hand so he could rest up, and sat myself down in our unit in front of my laptop for a relaxing few hours since I had already finished most of the work.
I had just turned in the shipping paperwork for our tools, and was expecting to be on a helicopter in a few hours when I got a call from the Company Man saying that he wanted to send all of us in as soon as possible. All of the crew, all of our tools. I woke up all of the sleeping guys, instructing them to pack and be ready to leave, and re-did all of the shipping paperwork.
Two hours later, the weather is looking pretty iffy and we're not sure if the helicopters will be able to fly. I get a call from my manager instructing us to leave one set of tools on the rig (and a nuclear source! Is it allowed to stay on the rig unsupervised? Apparently so.) I redo the shipping paperwork again.
By early afternoon a thick, pea-soup fog has set in and its clear the helicopters won't be flying. Our tools are all ready to go, and other than a few last-minute requests for additional data from town I have little to do but sit and stew. When I went to bed I was given the possibility of leaving on a boat that evening and was told I would be woken up in that event. Morning came with no wake-up call, and little elucidation into the future's plans for me. The fog was gone, but a check of the three posted helicopter manifests failed to reveal my name or the names of my crew members. I found out that I might still be sent in on the boat, which hadn't even left port yet, or I might be on a fourth and yet unscheduled helicopter.
With all these delays in leaving, our time to be home during the casing break is contracting tighter and tighter. As it is right now we are expected to return on Monday morning, which means we'll have to be at the hotel near the heliport Sunday night. An unexpected call from my manager yesterday, however, instructed me that I would not be coming back on Monday. There is another engineer who has been waiting in town for too long and needs some rig days. Now normally this would be considered "stealing" my spot, but she'll only be here for a week and I don't have the energy to care. A week on land looks like a nice little piece of heaven to me. And I could really go for a cold beer tonight.
As I wrote this post, I was confirmed on the manifest of the fourth flight this afternoon. The fog has cleared, and the first flight has already come and gone. Home, I'll be there soon.
Showing posts with label nuclear. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nuclear. Show all posts
Friday, January 22, 2010
Thursday, November 12, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Post For Post's Sake
When I haven't posted a blog update in a while, you can usually attribute my 'radio silence' to one of three reasons:
So I decided I might as well write SOMETHING on the blog, if only to keep Eric entertained. (Hi Eric!)
So here's an update on the goings-on in oilfield world. They're too short to make a blog post about each, but compiled together they make a nice briefing of sorts:
-- Radio Silence --
- I'm not on a rig and therefore have little to say about rig life.
- I'm on a rig and ridiculously busy with work and have no time to write.
- I'm on a rig and am bored out of my mind with no work to do and have nothing to write about.
- Reading articles on my favorite online news magazines
- Cropping, labeling, and sorting my 1,500+ family photos I scanned from the collections in Duxbury
- Napping
So I decided I might as well write SOMETHING on the blog, if only to keep Eric entertained. (Hi Eric!)
So here's an update on the goings-on in oilfield world. They're too short to make a blog post about each, but compiled together they make a nice briefing of sorts:
- While home and in Boston on vacation, I barely managed to increase my vegetable intake. I cannot say for sure that I even had a whole serving per day, so my firm resolve to up my veggies fell flat on its face. But, I eat TONS of veggies on the rig with lunch & dinner, so I can justify it, right? right?
- The wind has been quite brisk out here and the rig continues to rock, but in the way of experience mariners I seem to have developed my sea legs and the nausea has abated. Or maybe that's my sea stomach.
- We have about 3000 more feet to drill before we reach the section where we plan to run the nuclear tools, so until then I'm getting plenty of sleep. At this rate, we might never get there because they accidentally injected enough extra cement to fill an unexpected 400 more feet of hole than they planned, and we have spent the past 3 days drilling through it (That's 3 million dollars in unplanned operations costs, roughly, for those keeping score). 100 more feeet to go and then I'll actually have some work to keep me from being so bored all night.
- The rig recently received a new treadmill for the gym to replace the one that hasn't worked since before I got here in September. Now I have something to do cardio on besides the stationary bike (or the person that was going to steal the bike has now vacated it for the treadmill, either way its a win!).
-- Radio Silence --
Friday, October 9, 2009
Irradiated
Congratulations to me! I received my radiation Level 2 Category 1 certification yesterday. This means I am certified to work with unshielded radioactive sources. Plus side: this is one of the biggest steps towards getting my next promotion. Minus side: I now have legal responsibility for any nuclear-related activities I am involved in since I have been deemed "educated enough to know better". So if something goes wrong and I am determined negligent, I could go to jail. Ha ha ha..... don't you love promotions?
Back in May and June when I was sent home from the rig for 5 weeks when it shut down for repairs, I spent a lot of time working on my nuclear certification. The way this certification is performed is through a checklist of tasks to be done in the office. Each tool that is run with a nuclear source must be calibrated prior to going on a job, and these calibrations are long, arduous processes typically lasting 4-6 hours on a good day. Finish four of these, four wipe tests (which ensure a source is not leaking), do a bunch of toolbox inventories and various other tedious tasks, and you're given a set of keys and a LOT more responsibility.
I didn't write any blog posts about it, because I was too darn tired. I was in the calibration shack for about 15 hours a day, which was mostly outside in the Louisiana summer heat. The "shack" has a roof, but no walls, and within a 15 hour period we got a lot of sun on our faces.
I nearly completed my certification in the early summer, but then I went off to school in Houston before I could get to the very last step. The last step was to learn about all the proper shipping paperwork. I tried scheduling it again and again, and was put off again and again, until I fiiiiinally was able to corner the instructor this week and get it done.
So as of this afternoon I'm done! Yay! My next step is to obtain a set of keys that open the locks to the source transfer shields and then I have to go on a "breakout job". There a current nuclear cell manager will let me run the job, evaluate how I do, and determine whether I'm ready or not to become a nuclear cell manager myself. After all, this certification I just received is only a piece of paper. They're not just going to stamp my sheet and send me out into the wilderness on my own. They need to make sure I'm actually fit to run a job before I'm allowed to do one on my own. And I have just two words to say to that...
THANK GOODNESS.
Back in May and June when I was sent home from the rig for 5 weeks when it shut down for repairs, I spent a lot of time working on my nuclear certification. The way this certification is performed is through a checklist of tasks to be done in the office. Each tool that is run with a nuclear source must be calibrated prior to going on a job, and these calibrations are long, arduous processes typically lasting 4-6 hours on a good day. Finish four of these, four wipe tests (which ensure a source is not leaking), do a bunch of toolbox inventories and various other tedious tasks, and you're given a set of keys and a LOT more responsibility.
I didn't write any blog posts about it, because I was too darn tired. I was in the calibration shack for about 15 hours a day, which was mostly outside in the Louisiana summer heat. The "shack" has a roof, but no walls, and within a 15 hour period we got a lot of sun on our faces.
I nearly completed my certification in the early summer, but then I went off to school in Houston before I could get to the very last step. The last step was to learn about all the proper shipping paperwork. I tried scheduling it again and again, and was put off again and again, until I fiiiiinally was able to corner the instructor this week and get it done.
So as of this afternoon I'm done! Yay! My next step is to obtain a set of keys that open the locks to the source transfer shields and then I have to go on a "breakout job". There a current nuclear cell manager will let me run the job, evaluate how I do, and determine whether I'm ready or not to become a nuclear cell manager myself. After all, this certification I just received is only a piece of paper. They're not just going to stamp my sheet and send me out into the wilderness on my own. They need to make sure I'm actually fit to run a job before I'm allowed to do one on my own. And I have just two words to say to that...
THANK GOODNESS.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Self-preservation vs. Self-promotion
I am in the middle of a pleasantly lazy night. We finished drilling our last section 2 days ago, and I'm in the blissful state of standing by. This, however, is purely by luck of the timing.
They pulled the entire drilling assembly out of the hole last night. Between one thing and another, the tools I am responsible for were not out of the hole until after my shift ended at 6am. I could have stayed up late and helped out, but the 3rd hand had gone to bed early the night before to wake up just for that purpose. Plus I was ready -- after a long night of doing nothing -- to go to bed and relax.
When I came on shift tonight at 6pm, they had finished processing all of the data and were halfway through uploading it to town. I had managed to miss just about all of the work.
A lot of the work done today I could probably do blindfolded I have done it so many times. But there's this tool that uses sound waves to analyze the formation which I have only seen a couple of times, and it would have been useful for me to get another practice round processing and analyzing its data. But did I really want to lose that much sleep? Goodness knows how long it would take, and I'd still have to cover the night shift as well.
Soon this will have to change. I am fast approaching my next promotion which involves being authorized to be the lead hand on a nuclear job. Nuclear cell managers are legally responsible for the radioactive source inside the tool, and are notoriously sleep-deprived. Being a cell manager in any case can be an exercise in insomnia if you have a poor night hand -- in such cases you need to stay awake as long as you possibly can and pray that your night hand doesn't mess it all up while you're asleep in your chair.
In the meantime I feel like I may be letting down my lead hand for not staying up to help out more today, and not intending to do so tomorrow. Our next shipment of tools will be arriving in the morning, a couple hours after I expect to go to bed. I also feel like I'm letting down myself for not making more of an effort to learn what I can about the sound-wave tool, but I suppose I don't feel so bad that I'm going to stay up 24 hours a day...
After 3 weeks offshore with so little downtime however, I consider myself entitled to making sleep a priority. I can just kid myself and say I'll work doubly as hard on my next hitch!
They pulled the entire drilling assembly out of the hole last night. Between one thing and another, the tools I am responsible for were not out of the hole until after my shift ended at 6am. I could have stayed up late and helped out, but the 3rd hand had gone to bed early the night before to wake up just for that purpose. Plus I was ready -- after a long night of doing nothing -- to go to bed and relax.
When I came on shift tonight at 6pm, they had finished processing all of the data and were halfway through uploading it to town. I had managed to miss just about all of the work.
A lot of the work done today I could probably do blindfolded I have done it so many times. But there's this tool that uses sound waves to analyze the formation which I have only seen a couple of times, and it would have been useful for me to get another practice round processing and analyzing its data. But did I really want to lose that much sleep? Goodness knows how long it would take, and I'd still have to cover the night shift as well.
Soon this will have to change. I am fast approaching my next promotion which involves being authorized to be the lead hand on a nuclear job. Nuclear cell managers are legally responsible for the radioactive source inside the tool, and are notoriously sleep-deprived. Being a cell manager in any case can be an exercise in insomnia if you have a poor night hand -- in such cases you need to stay awake as long as you possibly can and pray that your night hand doesn't mess it all up while you're asleep in your chair.
In the meantime I feel like I may be letting down my lead hand for not staying up to help out more today, and not intending to do so tomorrow. Our next shipment of tools will be arriving in the morning, a couple hours after I expect to go to bed. I also feel like I'm letting down myself for not making more of an effort to learn what I can about the sound-wave tool, but I suppose I don't feel so bad that I'm going to stay up 24 hours a day...
After 3 weeks offshore with so little downtime however, I consider myself entitled to making sleep a priority. I can just kid myself and say I'll work doubly as hard on my next hitch!
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