It is the simple things

Rig Day 37:

We finished drilling the well! This last section of well did not come without a fight but shortly after 6am Friday morning we finally got to the target measured depth shortly over 5 weeks after starting the well. We should have finished the well a week ago, but due to delays on the rig we didn't start tripping back to the bottom of the well until Friday. Once down there we encountered problems with the bit and had to pull out of hole (POOH) to swap bits and components of the BHA. We tripped in hole (TIH) and began drilling again, but very slowly. Not to long after starting for the second time one of my tools stops working, fails, and we have to POOH - again. We get the BHA and the bit back to surface, swap out tools for a third time and TIH. To give you an idea of how frustrating this is, it takes a full day to bring the bit back to surface, change the tools in the BHA, and go back down to start drilling. C'est la vie. We have reached the depth we want and are now taking some test of the formation pressure and other awesome parameters such as fluid mobility (mD/cp) and other petroleum stuff. After that we will circulate a lot of drilling fluid (mud) to clean the hole from all the rock cuttings that may still be in the bore hole.

- Some clarification for my non petroleum industry family and friends - Oil is not found in vast underground lakes or caverns. Oil and gas occupy the pore space in-between the grains of sedimentary rock. Rock that was deposited by other means than volcanic lava  Let us take sandstone for example. Sandstone is made up of many many much smaller particles of sand fused or 'cemented' together. Imagine a room full of basketballs, baseballs, and golf balls all mixed together. There is air space around the balls as they cannot lay flat on top of each other. This is what the formation porosity is like in simple terms.
Permeability is the area that the fluid around these balls can flow through. If you have a room full of just volleyballs, there would be a lot more area for fluid to flow through than if you filled the room with golf balls. Rock is the same way only the balls are really tiny.
Crude oil also varies a lot from one reservoir to another. Brent crude oil of the North sea is different from the crude oil of West Texas and so on. Some oils are more viscous, like thick molasses, while others are less and more like runny maple syrup. Know the viscosity of the oil is essential to knowing how much oil you can recover.
Now, about the fluid in these pores that is trying to flow around the grains (the balls in the room). In the subsurface it will generally be water, oil, and gas. As the rocks are buried deeper and deeper the fluid likewise increases in pressure. Imagine you are in a deep swimming pool diving to the bottom. As you dive deeper, your ears experience more pressure the deeper you go. Essentially, the same thing happens here but sometimes the pressure can be higher or lower than what you would expect. This is important to know for recovering oil and gas from a well.

Okay, enough of that. I could keep going, but I will do so when the it fits, or if you have questions about something. I can go way to much into technical details, just ask my family.

After knocking off of work around 6:30am I decided to go up on the heli-deck to walk around, enjoy the sunrise, and reflect on the last 5 weeks. It felt good to know that the well was done and that I would be going back to shore in the next few days. Originally I was going to be as soon as Sunday, but that flight got canceled so it will more than likely be Monday. I have developed some small little things and habits that I find enjoyment in and make the days out here pass with more ease. For example, whenever I have a midnight meal I usually have a cup of coffee and a sweet. In the mornings I go for a walk or a run 20 minutes after eating. After washing up from exercising, I study a chapter of scripture and listen to music. At work, we have a stash of crackers and peanut butter for when those of us on tour get the need to snack. A nice cup of tea, crackers smothered in peanut butter are great to keep you going until the next meal. Also, I love the fresh oranges out here! They are really good! And the pizza on Sunday is something to look forward to. ;) Oh, one of the directional drillers on this project enjoyed having a cigar occasionally, so whenever we finished a section of the well we would split a cigar as a way to mark the progress of the job. It is the simple little things both personal and communal that help keep you sane.

It is Easter weekend, but I have no days off. That is okay though. It will still be a good time none the less. In general, part of making a great holiday is ones attitude/perspective during its observance. The church has certainly taught this, and so much more, during the lenten season leading into this weekend. While I may not have fully observed the lenten period, I certainly continue to pray that God would humble me before Him.

I wish you, the reader, a blessed and joyous weekend in celebration of the victory over death found only in Jesus the Messiah, the Risen LORD!



 

The Spell of the Yukon through the Ages

It is an intense sensation, and emotion that I have felt before, but I haven't felt anything quite this strong and of this variety for I don't know how long. There is something coming from deep inside me, the desire for something not present. It is love, yearning, and an ache for a vast land oh so far away. For people and places familiar. I have known it as has any who has ventured from one location to another; sometimes more than others. As discussed with other travelers, you leave parts of yourself in places where you connect with people in community. Many times I find this sensation to be un-focused on any one place, but for all places where you have left part of your story.

Not this time. Feel the call of the jagged snow capped mountains tumbling down to the emerald clad shores of a deep green icy lake, still as glass reflecting the splendor to the enormous land and vivid sky. The salt scented air of the fjords and bays, with glaciers meeting waters edge. This is the feeling of homesickness. Yes, I am homesick for Alaska, and I had it in a terrible way yesterday. All I had to do was close my eyes and scenes of dancing northern lights, or midnight sun camp fires with family and friends fill my mind's eye. It is unlike any place I have been and I am proud to call it home. 

Growing up my family often read together. We would read many classics of English and American literature. One of our favorite poets is Robert Service (1/16/1874 - 9/11/1958). Even at an early age my sister and I knew whole passages of verse from his works pertaining to Alaska. Just say, "There are strange things done in the midnight sun," and you would start us off on reciting the entire poem. All 17 verses. Here is one of our favorites which I would like to share.

The Spell of the Yukon
 By Robert Service

I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy - I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it-
Came out with a fortune last fall-
Yet somehow life's not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn't all.

No, There's the land. (Have you seen it?)
It's the cussedest land that I know,
From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it,
To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when He made it,
Some say it's a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there's some as would trade it
For no land on earth - and I'm one.

You come to get rich (damned good reason);
You feel like an exile at first;
You hate it like hell for a season,
And then you are worse than the worst.
It grips you like some kinds of sinning,
It twists you from foe to a friend;
It seems it's been since the beginning,
It seems it will be to the end.

I've stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That's plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I've watched the big, husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim,
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,
And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop,
And I've thought that I surely was dreaming,
With the peace o' the world piled on top.

The summer-no sweeter was ever;
The sunshiny woods all a thrill;
The grayling aleap in the river,
The bighorn asleep on the hill.
The strong life that never knows harness;
The wilds where the caribou call;
The freshness, the freedom, the fairness
O God! How I'm stuck on it all.

The winter! The brightness that blinds you,
The white land locked tight as a drum,
The cold fear that follows and finds you,
The silence that bludgeons you dumb.
The snows that are older than history,
The woods where the weird shadows slant;
The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,
I've bade 'em goodbye, but I can't.

There's a land where the mountains are nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still,
There's a land - Oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back - and I will.

They're making my money diminish;
I'm sick of the taste of champagne.
Thank God when I'm skinned to a finish
I'll pike to the Yukon again.
I'll fight-and you bet it's no sham-fight;
It's hell! - But I've been there before;
And it's better than this by a damn sight,
So me for the Yukon once more.

There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting;
It's luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It's the great, big, broad land way up yonder,
It's the forests where silence has lease;
It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It's the stillness that fills me with peace.

Day 5&6 - Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday

My time has been full, but here is a recap of the past couple day or at least a few scattered thoughts.

...

Whew, these last 36 hours quite full as I didn’t have the down time that I have had previously. While some days are monotonous, these two were not. Also they made me realize how much better it is to work nights. I am a day behind in writing as yesterday once I got off work I only made time to write a message to a friend and went straight to bed. There is much to write about to fill in what madness of life we lead here on the rig all to produce crude from rocks thousands of meters below the ocean for modern societies use.  

 

Tuesday 1800:

We are tripping the pipe out of the hole and we are getting ready to lay down the BHA this evening. During the hours before the BHA with our tools in it gets to surface I work on preparing the log formats in our software systems and various other tasks in the unit. One of the more experience MWD engineers is back from days off and we catch up on what has been happening. He is a really cool guy and I look forward to working nights with him. We go over what the next hour’s events will be and the key things that I need to do in order to be ready for my upcoming promotion review. Around 20:30 I go out to the back deck to prepare some of the tools not used in this run for shipping back to town. It is hot sweat work, and it takes a while to dry off afterwards. It is not long now until we lay down the BHA so we grab a quick meal before at 2300hr. 

In taking down the BHA I should clarify. I am not doing the job of the roughneck in setting the slips, throwing tongs, or working the iron torque connecter (called the Iron Roughneck), however I am there on deck showing the guys which connection to break in the drill collars, and once the collars are disconnected covering the electron connection inside and covering the threads with their protectors. We also look for wear on the tools and any signs of damage. Depending on which tools are in the BHA we can also have other responsibilities which I will not go into here. 

As we get our tools laid out on the back deck away from the busy drill floor we need to plug into the electronics and recover the recorded memory in the tool. In taking measurements of the downhole environment only some of the data can be sent back up the hole and real time. The rest is recorded to the tool. While recovering the memory we work to clean the electronics connections and prepare the tools for being shipped of the rig. They must go back to town to make room for other tools coming on board. Yet again, hot sweaty outdoor work for 4 hours and from which I really didn’t dry out from until the end of my shift. 

The outside work is done for now, and for the rest of my tour and the beginning of the next I work on making logs for the client. These are more import and must be right the first time, or else you get some very unhappy people on your hands. As any Mines PE student can tell you, very often most of your time is taken in formatting your work precisely and consistently. Attention to detail is vital and you take the time to do it right. Put a room full of engineers and geologist together looking at your work and they will notice the smallest inconsistency, even if it just cosmetic and doesn’t change the data. Anyway, while I thoroughly enjoying working with my hands any day, I also kind of like this type of work that about attention to detail. I plug in my headphones and listen to some epic Spanish guitar instrumental music that helps me focus. Numerous editing renditions later, my work is complete and the day tour MWD quality checks my work. It is good to go and is sent off. It has been a packed day and there is more to come this evening. 

Wednesday 1800:

All the tools we prepared for sending back to shore are gone and the next batch is here. This means plenty of prep work to be done. Also, our computer systems are being re-shuffled. Hence my evening is split in two episodes. Working in the air conditioned unit and loosing several pounds in sweat outside. The first half of the night I spend backing-up files from one computer and restoring them on another machine. This takes several hours of installing various patches and files. It provides a great opportunity to learn more about the details of the software that I use in my job. After the mid night meal I head outside to strap the new tools and program them.

Around midnight I start in on the tools outside by measuring the lengths, inner diameters, and outer diameters, and other checks. We have 11 tools to measure so this can take a little while. Even though it is the dead of night, the temperature is still a humid 80 plus degrees and there is no wind on this side of the rig. The only time this side of the rig gets wind is when a storm is moving in from the north and you have about 5-10 minutes before the rain comes. For this Alaskan, just standing outside in my work coveralls and hard hat, sweat begins run down my face. In no time at all my coveralls are drenched. I drink lots of water and when ever I go in the air conditioned unit to work briefly on the programing I try not to stay to long to where I get chilled. I can't imagine what it would be like to do this same work out under the intense sunshine. After a long tiring night, a hot shower and dry clothes this morning made me feel like a new man when I went to breakfast. I am in high spirits after a good nights work. Also, I say goodbye to some of the guys who are leaving the rig today. It will my turn in about 2 weeks when the well is done. 

Day 21 on the rig. Total rig days: 42.

Day 4 - Monday into Tuesday

Nothing that exceptional happened today, and as such it is interesting trying to sit here and write this post. This last day was one of those days which can cause a man to lose track of all time out here. It was more or less the same as the day before, and the day before that. And yes, I did wake up at the appropriate time.

The evening as marked by making logs at every connection, taking my usual depth and pressure readings, and making the morning report. In this section of well we are putting a curve in it to where it is almost horizontal and it is curving to the lest into the target formation. I spend quite a bit of my down time asking the DD questions and learning what he is looking for and how he plans to steer the well, and why. It is really an art form that makes every well unique. The well designers in Aberdeen, Houston, Stavanger, or where ever come up with a plan for where to put the well  and what its profile will look like. The DD is the person that steers the well according to the plan. The challenge is you never now quite how the tools will respond and how the formations will affect you. As we drilled deeper and deeper last night, we would send downlinks to the BHA telling it which direction to steer and by how much percent of the time. It is really some pretty cool stuff. I end my shift with only 40meters to go until the end of this run. After the section reaches total depth (TD) they will circulate mud for a while to clean the hole from all the cuttings. Then they will pull out of hole (POOH) and we will lay down the BHA. From there we plug cables into our tools and retrieve recorded data from the tool memory. I am now ahead of my self. That will be tomorrows post because we should be laying BHA down around 2300hr this evening (Tuesday).

That is all for now and I am tired. I have been staying past 0600 to talk with the day guys and ask questions about things encountered during the night tour. I will have more to write about tomorrow.

Peace!

Day 3 - Sunday/Monday

Sunday, started off so well, then went so wrong, and ended with high spirits. 

Every week the rig has a fire drill and an abandon rig drill. This occurs every Sunday afternoon at 12:30. This kind of stinks for those of us who work 18:00 to 6:00, but it must be done. The sirens wake me up, well I guess half way wake me up. More in a half conscious state I slip into my coveralls, pull on my boots, grab my hard hat and safety glasses, and pull my life jacket out of the closet and put it on. The muster point is by the forward lifeboats. There is a card there I must grab with my room and bunk number which is assigned to me. This is a way that those in charge of ensuring a full muster can quickly tell who is and is not present. In my half conscious state, I convince myself that I am in bunk 2 and grab the appropriate card. Now I take my place milling about the forward deck seeking out a spot near the railing that offers both a little shade and breeze off the water. I like this spot, you can stand here and gaze out to the southern horizon. To the left on a clear day you can see the continental coastline, to the front and the right is the boundless ocean. Antarctica lays many thousands of miles to the south and South America thousands of miles to the west. It boggles the mind, at least my mind, when I try to comprehend how vast this world is. I can spit out facts to describe it such as mass, diameter, surface area of land or sea, density, but to just realize what those facts mean. This is an incredible plant, no matter how it lines up with other potentially habitual plants in the universe. 

About five minutes later they call out my name and I go forward only to realize that I made a mistake. My bunk number is in fact number 1, so I swap out cards. I am subsequently counted as ‘missing’ for the fire drill, but present for the abandon rig drill. This is dumb/irresponsible mistake number one. Oh, I should mention that my cabin mate is the day MWD so he called in and was not required to be present at the drill. A rig operates 24hrs a day and those vital to making sure it stays fully operational can call in for the drill and are not required to be physically present. 

After the drills conclude there is a weekly safety meeting in the rec room. This meeting is different from the pre-tour safety meeting in that they cover a particular safety item to cover. Today we learned about heat related hazards, and how to mitigate the risk of heat related incidents. As I struggled to keep my eyelids open, I start to question how much water I drink and then I start to experience the phenomena of feeling the symptoms of what was being talked about. Haha, head ache, dizziness, nausea, unclear thinking or actions, ect… oh, and heat rashes. I don’t pay attention to heat rashes when here in Africa though because I have easily gotten heat rashes since I was a little kid. Finally, the meeting is over. I go to the galley to get a water bottle, and head back to bed. I set my alarms for 17:00 and 17:05 and easily drift into what will prove to be a very deep sleep. 

19:20:

I wake up as Purdue, the day MWD, opens the cabin door and calls out, “Hey Andrew, are you awake?”  Me, “Nope, but I am now. I am really, really sorry!” Talk about majorly irresponsible. Sleeping though ones alarm and being late to work is something I hate and to my mind is the mark of being non trust worthy, irresponsible, and in general a bad employee. This is the classic no-no. As I quickly throw on my work clothes and head out to the work unit, I know I won’t hear the end of this for a while, and I deserve it. It is now 19:25 and I am explaining that I have no excuse for my actions. I have earned myself a nick name now with the company man (the man who is essentially in charge of the rig). I am Rip Van Winkle. Nicknames are a tricky thing, you hope to get a cool nickname, but those generally take time to earn. The potential embarrassing or un-cool nick names come from stupidity, and are earn instantly. Rip Van Winkle, it has a massive stigma of being a sleepy head and therefore is the later kind of nickname. I mildly redeem myself with my fellow night shift companions by keeping the coffee pot flowing. 

We aren’t going to be drilling until past midnight, so fortunately I didn’t over sleep on anything critically important. The evening starts out slow as we are doing a wiper trip, which is where you circulate, bring the bit back up the hole a ways, circulate, run the bit back to the bottom, and circulate again. I think about calling people, but it is a Sunday morning/early afternoon and the sates, and an hour later in Germany. So I settle on reading, listening to music, writing a little, and chatting with other SLB friends around the world.

Fun fact of the post, with EQG being almost smack dab on the equator, the difference in daylight from winter to summer is 4 minutes. Sunrise is at 6:45 and sunset is at 18:45. Therefore, we don’t have daylight savings time. Half the year we are in time with the British Isles, and half the year with the continental Europe. 

Once we start drilling again around 2 in the morning things go smoothly. I check my depth sensor, and record pressure readings, as well as send out my reports, logs, and excel spreadsheets. There is a question about one of the excel files, and while I can give a basic explanation of what it is used for, I decide to go do more background reading on it. Well that is about it. Drilling is going really smoothly. As the company man said in the safety meeting, these last few weeks has been some of the smoothest drilling operations he has seen in a long time. I am reminded to stay diligent though as you don't want to ever let your guard down out here. The crew change is at 0600hr and I spend the next 45 minutes asking questions about details that I was not clear on through the evening. It is vital that I learn what I don't know, and to know what I don't know. If that makes any sense. I headed to the galley before it closed at 7am. Time for another days sleep, better wake up on time.

Chow!

P.S.

This is a view of the "Moon Pool". You can see the yellow bit suspended from the BHA coming down from the roof. This is from an earlier run. The 26 inch diameter section. Photo thanks agian to work colleagues.

Day 2 - Saturday/Sunday

This is going to be a short post, as I need to get some sleep before being woken up for the Sunday afternoon fire drill.

Saturday 1700hr:

I woke up later than I usually do and really didn’t have time for much more than a short shower and going to the pre-tour safety meeting. I grab an orange from the galley and head to work, I will eat a full meal come midnight. (The mid night meal was surprising good today!)

We have been drilling ahead smoothing pretty much all day, and it is looking like a good evening of drilling operations without any hiccups. The rate of penetration (ROP) into the new formation has been really good, and we are drilling about 28 meters in just under an hour and half. This means that the time in between the burst of activity I mentioned in the last post are quite useful for tending to other things that need attention. During this time I work on the computers and do some personal stuff. A little bit about my work station. Typically on a offshore rig, Schlumberger (SLB) would have its own modular logging unit with all out computers and other systems. On this rig we are in one of the rigs units below and to the left of the drill floor. It is a long room with mud loggers and geologist on one side and SLB on the other. On SLB’s end there is the DD station and then the MWD spot where I work. Beside my work laptop, there are three other monitors up with various programs running for doing the job and a modem cabinet with other sensor acquisition devices and printers. On one computer we have a data processing program which monitors and translates the signal received from downhole into meaningful numbers for the other two computers. The two other computers process the data from the first and display it onto the logs that I mentioned in yesterdays post. Also from these two we have displays sent to the operator company man and to the driller so they can monitor what is going on in the well.

It is a quiet evening and I spend some time talking with a friend on chat. Within SLB we have a chat communicator that is really quite nice. We usually have good conversations about questions of life and the bible. This conversation was no exception. We talk back and forth until I have to go again, and she finishes here work half way across the world. I spend the rest of my time busy with various things throughout the evening. The day MWD has let me grab some music from his hard drive so I get a couple of albums that I have wanted to get for a while now.  

This morning I decided to stay at work a little longer and work on cleaning up and organizing my laptop files. I have been meaning to do this for a while. I am really glad it did. Around 0700 I went up to the rig floor and on my way back I got to enjoy the beautiful morning. It is a particularly clear morning and not only can I see the coast line but the mountains several miles inland. Typically there is a thick haze that obscures the coast line. Today it is a glorious morning, the kind that you realize how cool it is to be alive. It isn’t too hot, the sea breeze is cool and refreshing, and the ocean is gently lapping at the base of the rig. Yet another day in paradise or something close to it. 

Later! 

Photo thanks to my co-worker.