Day 1 - Friday

Well, it is time to do it.  I have absolutely neglected this blog and it is time to change that, or at least try once again. I have received many questions about what it is I do from family, friends, and those being interviewed by my company. In the next couple of posts I will give you a day by day blow of what my job entails. Before I go to bed each morning, I will write about the previous day’s activity and post in the evening, EG time. So for all of you in the states it will be in the late morning/early afternoon. To give you a full picture of my job I will back track to Thursday and get you caught up. Oh, as background, if you didn’t know before I work in West Africa, my job title is a measurements and logging while drilling (MLWD or MWD) field engineer, I am about to break out from being a trainee, and I work on an offshore drilling rig. Also, on any rig you have three major categories of companies; you have the operator, the rig contractor, and 3^rd party. Schlumberger is one of several 3^rd party companies on this rig.

Thursday 1730hr:

I start my shift after going to a pre-tour (pronounced “tower”) safety meeting. In the safety meeting we go over what activities are being conducted and safety incidents from the previous 24 hours. Tonight we are picking up the bottom hole assembly (BHA) and therefore the drill floor and the back deck are going to be very busy. A little about the BHA, Schlumberger is a service provider, and the drilling and measurements segment that I work in has tools which go in the BHA to steer and measure parameters of the well. During the day, the day MWD (who I will call Purdue) has programmed the tools which we are using for drilling the next section of the well and made sure that they are cleaned and in working order. Now we communicate with the crane crew to let them know which tools need to be picked up to the drill floor. The directional driller (DD) communicates with the crew as the bit and the steering tool are made up as the beginning of the BHA. After that, under the supervision of Purdue, I communicate with the crew that works on the drill floor (rough necks) how to properly make up the connections of collars which my tools are inside of. After we make up all the tools and before we add anymore length to the BHA which is now around 30 meters in length, we run what is called a shallow hole test (SHT). A SHT is where you turn on the directional, measurement, and logging tools and check to make sure that all our electronic tools are communicating and work they way we expect them too. This is a very important test because if something is wrong here we can easily lay down the tool that is the issue and pick up one of our back up tools. This is better than getting to the bottom of the well 1900 meters down only to discover that something doesn’t work. The SHT passes.

Friday 0000hr: 

In the hours before midnight, the rest of the BHA is made up and consists of heavier pipe called collars and heavy weight drill pipe. Once the BHA is made, the rig crew slowly lowers the drill string down 28 meters at a time, adding another stand of drill pipe and lowering the string again. This is called tripping in hole, or running in hole. It will be several hours before we reach the bottom of the well we have drilled on previous sections/runs. During this time I work on several tasks to prepare for drilling this next section of the well. There are several sensors that need calibrating and I coordinate with the rig operator and get these sensors tuned. Now that it is past midnight I can work on submitting the daily report for Thursday’s activities and any parameters of operations. Once this is done I have several hours to myself, and I work on wrapping up some online training, read some reference material, catch on email and fb, and watch a TV show on the DD’s laptop. Our nick name as MWDs after all is movie watching dudes. ;)  Just before my shift ends at 0600hr we reach the bottom of the well and touch bottom (tag cement). This is where I connect our depth tracking sensor and set it the depth that the driller has on his pipe tally. 

Now that we have tagged bottom, there are several things that need to happen. First the rig must circulate a denser mud into the well to prepare for the next section. After that we need to drill though the cement, well there is more than just cement but for our purposes, cement. After the cement is drilled we will drill a couple of meters into the new formation and test the formation. I end my tour at 0600hr expecting these things to occur before I start my next shift. I go inside and have a good breakfast of eggs and toast, work out, shower, and am in bed by 0800. I fall asleep to Top Gear playing on the TV. I had already seen the episode. 

Friday 1600hr: 

I wake up and spend some time reading, praying, and journal. Around 5 I head down to “dinner.” The food this evening is not that great. I eat some slices of cucumber and French fries. I get a cup of coffee and head to the safety meeting. After that gets out, with personal protection equipment (PPE) on, I head out to work. When I get to the unit, I find out that the other stuff beside the cement which I mention previously took most of the last 12 hours to drill through. This means I get to do another part of the MLWD operations; once we drilled out past the cement in to virgin formation we conduct a formation integrity test (FIT). The FIT tests the strength of the formation. We do this by increasing the pressure exerted on the rock and if it holds up. On my end, I monitor the pressures detected by my tools down at the bottom of the well. The information comes up through the mud inside the pipe in a signal that is picked up at surface. Well that is the simple way of saying it. Once we finish the test, I give a filled out form to the company man. The test is good. We are ready to drill!   

Tonight will be interspersed with periods of activity whenever we reach the end of one stand of drill pipe and add the next 28 meters of pipe onto the pipe already in the hole. To give a simple description, during these connections I record several pieces of data such as pressure, density, and where the bit is pointing. I also fill out a journal which will be used in the daily drilling report. Once this is done, I check that my depth sensor is reading correctly by comparing the known length of the pipe in the hole to what it is showing. Now that I have that done there is usually about an hour until the next connection. I use this time to work on generating real time logs of the data that I am getting from my tools. Ah, I should explain. A log in the sense I am using it is a graph with various kinds of information plotted on it versus either depth or time. For example, on a depth based log, the depth is on the y-axis and parameters such as pressure, temperature, and many others things. The well site geologist has requested a couple logs with a different set up to the usual ones, so I make those for him. The communication on the rig is pretty cool. Each office or work station has a phone. There is a three digit number that corresponds to a particular aspect of operations. So, the geologist, company man, or driller can call me up any time and I can call them. 

Also in this time in between connection I took the time to write some emails, read some work related material that was “assigned” to me as my learning homework for the evening. I check fb and see that my mom has asked me to call her, so I talk with her on the unit phone for about 30 minutes at around 0300. We have been having some excellent conversations lately, and I am reminded of how much I miss home.

Saturday 0600:

All in all, the shift has been uneventful. It is now Saturday morning, and once again I head to the galley for an omelet and toast. So here I sit in my room typing this up to post this evening. Please let me know if you have any questions about what I wrote, and I will address them in the following post.

Cheers!