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.

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!