900 feet left

Yesterday was the first day all week that I woke up on time and didn't sleep through my alarm, so I took advantage of my early rising to run over four miles on the treadmill before my shift. Had I known what a physically and mentally demanding day was ahead of me after I showered and ate breakfast, I might have cut back on the mileage.

Now after a shaky 5 hours of sleep, I'm stewing in the exhaustion from my 21-hour day yesterday, and enjoying the residual caffeine that's still in my system from downing Diet Cokes just to get through the next round of "To-Do List" items. The rig finally made a decision early yesterday morning to pull out of the hole and finish the last 900 feet (they tacked on a bit more to the Total Depth) with a different set of tools.

Unfortunately for me, my coworker who is super-experienced in these tools had just gone back to town, having finished the week we had been allowed to have him. So I was up until one in the morning obsessively checking every last detail of the processed logs and data before sending them to the client, only occasionally turning to my new night hand and green-at-the-gills trainee to teach them a thing or two about what exactly I was doing and what they should be learning at that moment.

I fear my grammar is suffering this morning. Please forgive me. Last night my brain was so over-worked I would routinely forget the names of both my night hand and trainee as well as what I had told them five minutes prior. It must have been an entertaining evening for them.

In the meantime I get to chill. Maybe I'll even take a chair nap -- but I probably have too much caffeine left in my system for that. We're waiting on a boat to bring a new computer so the rig floor can have a working monitoring system. Apparently you have to be able to tell what exactly it is you're doing while drilling in order to be in compliance with national regulatory agencies.

I hope to take as much advantage as possible of any chances to relax over the next few days. Once we finish this last 900 feet of drilling, my two coworkers are going to do something I've never done before: RIG DOWN. While rigging up usually has to be done quicker than it should be, involves lots of complicated planning and decision making, rigging down always has to be done faster than is humanly possible, is one of the messiest, dirtiest, and in worst cases: most disorganized parts of our job (from what I hear). We take down all the sensors and the cables that have been run all over the rig over the past couple of months. They're caked in mud and oil, tangled into the hundreds of other cables run by other service employees, and secured with thousands of sturdy plastic zip-ties to hand-railings, walkways, and cable-trays a good 30 feet over our heads. All the while you've got the company man breathing down your neck dying to drop you on the boat and ship you back to land; once we're done drilling he doesn't want to pay for us to be out here one minute longer than absolutely necessary. Not to mention the managers in the offices in town clamoring for the final processed data -- because we clearly have PLENTY of time to spend poring over our logs at this point.

And then bliss: when you've reached land, showered the diesel fumes out of your hair, and after a couple of all-nighters in the office End of Well Report is turned in, you can go to the nearest bar and enjoy that first celebratory beer. Who needs "job well done" when the words "job done" are satisfying enough?

I surely can't wait.

A Few Gray Hairs

Oh the shame, the shame! It's been over a month since my last post. I have been shockingly remiss in keeping you abreast on oilfield news, and for that you have my apologies.

I returned to the Gulf of Mexico a mere five days ago, and I have quickly transitioned through all my major reasons for not posting. From the previous "not on a rig and therefore not posting" to the ever-disappointing "mired in boredom from lack of work on the rig and therefore feel like I have nothing interesting to post", after which the "far and above too busy with work to have time to post".

I arrived here with the directive to rig up all of the equipment and prepare for the first drilling run. At first I was mostly prevented from accomplishing this goal due to the fact that only one third of our equipment was actually on the rig. The rest was floating on the boats it had come out on, unable to be offloaded due to the high winds making crane activity dangerous.

So we did what we could with what we had, which mainly entailed running dozens of cables all over the surface of the rig and installing the few sensors we could. When the rest of our equipment did show up I soon regretted I had ever hoped for such a day.

There were so many problems I did not know where to start. I was overwhelmed, under-rested, and completely at a loss as to how to solve them all. Worse yet, I was in charge. I have the responsibility for this job. I have my name next to the title of "Cell Manager" in the daily reports. I am the one who has to answer for any mistakes. It was nearly enough to send me off the side of the rig and swimming the hundred miles or more to shore. I was a wreck.

But as of this morning I have somehow reached a state of equilibrium, if not success. The equipment having problems that could be solved was fixed, and the equipment with problems that could not be solved will soon be replaced. There are many things that could go wrong between now and when we begin drilling, but I can't solve problems that haven't occurred yet -- or so I tell myself. I am in the eye of the (figurative) hurricane. Once we do start drilling it will be a non-stop race to the end of this projected 40-day well. It's going to be a fast-paced frantic train-wreck of a job and I'm sure to have a few more gray hairs by the end of it. Maybe it's the rarely-seen pessimist in me, but I'm girding my loins for the worst.

Wish me luck!

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.

Foot-Dragging Days

I haven't written anything lately because I've been in a bad mood ever since we finished our first run of drilling, or rather ever since I was obliged to start working again after being on standby immediately following our first run of drilling. I think I was just so physically exhausted after rigging up, that when we finished drilling last Sunday I was so relieved to have a couple days off that the abrupt foreshortening of my standby time threw me into some terrible blue devils.

Since then it's been a struggle to do some of the most mundane tasks, which hasn't made the necessary complex troubleshooting any easier either. Luckily there are a couple of new people out here (my former lead hand was sent home with pink eye, and our third hand was replaced by an expert on the higher-tier tool we're running this section), and they are more than willing to help out with that.

I'm gradually getting myself going again, and now that we're back to drilling this is a lot easier. There's something comforting about the drill bit rotating thousands of feet below and the constant stream of binary data transmitted through the drilling mud that enables me to find my working rhythm; my natural frequency of duty. Productivity is becoming less and less of a struggle these days.

But on Wednesday we have an audit scheduled. One of our managers is apparently hitching a ride on the oil company's swanky helicopter they're flying out here for a day-trip to look over the rig. She thought it would be "fun", and suggested doing an audit on our Measurements While Drilling operations out here in order to justify coming along with them. This means doing a complete inventory of all our tools, filling out endless forms, updating all our computers and making sure that this "chaos" that erupts from the natural order of things out here can be organized into a neat and tidy bundle of information.

I guess it's time to find some more motivation from somewhere...

Maybe tomorrow.

I had it coming

There is an obstacle that all MWD Field Engineers must overcome at one point or another in their jobs. Some of them may have to overcome this obstacle nearly every week. Some almost never. But it is a hurdle that is looked upon with dread and a deep groan of despair.

It is the "rig up".

Rigging up involves taking a box full of cables and miscellaneous sensors, and another box full of computers, and installing them all throughout the messy, noisy, dangerous environment of the rig and making them all work in perfect harmony. The goal is to achieve something akin to placing electrodes on a person to monitor their vital signs. With this setup, we have our fingers on the pulse points of the rig's operations, and are prepared to do our jobs.

My very first day in the field started late at night in Arkansas. I arrived to a rig through a torrential downpour and I was to help rig up for the job. The jobs in Arkansas use considerably fewer sensors and much less complicated equipment, but it was enough to get me soaked through and yet not enough to teach me anything useful.

I have been in the highly enviable position of having worked in the field for a year and a half without having to participate in any offshore rig ups. Until now.

I was the first one sent on this job, and I arrived on the rig Monday night. With the help of the rig's electrician, I accomplished the first major task: I got power to our unit (actually the electrician did all the work, and I just unlocked the door).

Tuesday morning my cell manager arrived, and we began our rig up in earnest. What ensued was a series of days where I averaged about 18 hours of work and 5 hours of sleep per day, and my cell manager considerably more and less, respectively. And this was not "stare at computer screens and type until your eyes can't focus and your wrists can't bend". This was running 300ft lengths of cabling through a complicated series of nooks and crannies. This was installing 50lb sensors 150ft above the rig floor. This was learning an unfamiliar electrical system to literally wire ourselves into the rig itself. It was checking and double checking each connection so that we wouldn't miss a single piece of information while we were drilling. It was sweaty, backbreaking, mind-numbing work that went on for days, and isn't even finished yet (all I have left now, though, is to just rearrange some of my cables to make them look neater).

There was a report written by a crew who had previously rigged up here, and their assessment was that it would take about 4 days for a crew of 4 people to complete the entire process at a reasonable pace. We had 2 1/2 days, and our third crew member wasn't able to arrive until our final half day. When it was all over I slept for 15 hour straight and showed up early to my next shift so that my cell manager could go ahead and do the exact same thing.

Theoretically these cables and sensors should remain in place for up to the next five years. Now our only hope is that the client doesn't run us off the rig and force us to rig down everything we've just finished putting up!

The Elevator Story

I promised I would later talk about how I get trapped in the elevator. Spoiler alert! I got trapped, and I got out. (Sorry to ruin the suspense)

This is the first rig I've ever been to that has an elevator. I've heard of rigs having elevators in the living quarters, but this elevator went up the derrick! This was extremely useful for us while we were rigging up all our sensors and equipment, because I was taking multiple trips daily to parts of the derrick that were 100-150 feet above the rig floor, and I was working hard enough as it was without having to climb hundreds more steps each day in the fulfillment of my duties.

This elevator, like many mechanical moving parts on a rig, is filthy, utilitarian, and half of its components have ceased to work, but it still goes up and down... most of the time.

I had ridden in this elevator many times before, at points crammed in with two companions and armfuls of wires and tools. My very first time riding by myself, I got in, pressed the button, saw its light flash on, and waited. Nothing happened. The light kept flashing on the button as if to say "Don't worry, we'll get there" but to no avail. I tried pressing it again. I tried pressing other buttons. I tried to open the doors. No luck. I was locked inside and not going anywhere. I tried the phone, which I already knew was dead. Sure enough, it was still dead.

I had had enough foresight to be sure multiple people knew where I was intending to go, so it seemed like only a matter of time before I was found. Could I rescue myself? Perhaps. There was a vent and an active fan, so I was in no forseeable danger, and I wasn't feeling particularly adventurous, so for the meantime I stared out to sea and contemplated life. And I took this picture:


Eventually I thought that I might want to be a bit more proactive about getting myself out of there and back to work. We still had plenty of rigging up left to do, and I wasn't going to get out of my share of it so easily. I struggled with my distaste to call attention to myself and after about three agonizing minutes of self-deliberation, I punched in the "Alarm" button. Guess what happened! Nothing.

Then I noticed something that looked remarkably like a trap door on the ceiling. It had a handle which I attempted to unlatch, but it seemed a bit stuck. I postponed making further attempts at turning it until after I'd enjoyed my vacation a bit longer.

When the sun set, I knew I had to stop shilly-shallying. I resolutely ignored the fact that I really didn't want to climb out of the elevator through the uncomfortably small-looking trapped door with the awkwardly placed escape ladder, screwed up my courage and my strength, and twisted the handle to open. It turned. I pushed up on the door, and it opened a few inches.

Then my bravado failed me and I let the trap door close again. But at that very moment my coworker, having expected a phone call from me ages ago, showed up trying to find out where I had gone. I gesticulated to him through the tiny window with the thick metal grating, and before I knew it he had effortlessly slid the door open to see my dumbfounded face.

The door had been locked. I had fruitlessly attempted to force it open dozens of times, and yet here he is opening it and looking at me as if I'm the biggest slowtop of all history. As it turns out, unlatching the escape hatch cancels all buttons pressed and unlocks the doors. What a joke.

I stewed in the elevator for a total of somewhere around 30-40 minutes before I escaped, and then promptly re-entered it and rode up 90 feet in the derrick to fix a troublesome sensor. It was a small adventure; a small vacation from the drudgery of rigging up. I enjoyed it.