Author: Becky

Today I did something that I have never done before. I went to get my stamp of approval from the local Indian Tribe.  There are 562 tribes in the US all of them are souvenir nations of their own with the rights and privileges thereof, spread out in 34 states.  I have worked in Indian Territory before in Oklahoma and Alaska. Each place has different ways of doing things. For example in Alaska before you an even get to the rig you have to take a class on the local history and how the communities operate and what rules you have obey. They don’t allow alcohol of any kind in the villages up there.  Oklahoma was very different with almost no restrictions.  The Fort Berthold Reservation here in North Dakota is home to three different tribes the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara.  Little bit of history Sacagawea was kidnaped by the Hidatsa tribe as child and brought to North Dakota long before she helped Lewis and Clark. She is still the most famous person from the area and lots of thing are named after her including the lake.

To drill on the reservation you have to have a special permit. Now this permit isn’t just for the operators that run the whole show like elsewhere in the world. Every single person that comes on to reservation for a work related purpose has to have this badge.  Some states have this rule too but they are not nearly as strictly enforced. The tribal authorities are very strict.  Seeing as I am working in this part of the world I had to get my stamp: thus today’s adventure.

To get this special stamp first you have to get lots of paperwork from the Boss that says you are in fact an employee and have a personal vehicle.  Next you have to find the right office. You are looking for the MHA tribal office. Not the office of Buru of Land Management, or the Department of the Interior, nor the Buru of Indian Affairs office. No this is the MHA Tribal Office. After you have been to all the other offices and figured out where it is you need to go  you cross the very frozen and cold looking Lake Sacagawea pass the big new casino and head out of town about 20 miles.  At this point google will tell you to turn in to the cemetery (some bad joke in there somewhere) but really you want to turn down Buru of Indian Affairs road #2.  (goggle still thinks you should turn in to the cemetery but really you go the other way) and then you turn into a dirt parking lot in front of a pair of non-descript double wide trailers on stilts.

As soon as you walk in and you are on tribal time. Whatever you are thinking a tribal office should look like you are wrong.  Looks more like a doctor’s waiting room than anything else. The local bulletin board is covered in flyers for upcoming events and information about what road the truck drivers can drive on.  Water cooler in the corner, news channel on the TV, a few computers so you can register online.  What I don’t see is anything related to the casino at all. That must be a different office.  I shuffle over to the receptionist very conscientious of my big work boots and ask if I’m in the right spot.  Turns out I am! Victory! “Have a seat and she will help you as soon as her computer fires up.”

Twenty minutes later I am in a back room handing over my paperwork and $200. Five clicks later and she hands me a freshly printed, red sticker with my name on it and everything. The sticker its self is about the size of the boat registrations you stick on your shiny new fishing boat. She then sticks the sticker on to a hanger and wha-la! I’m done. I looks like the parking passes I use to get for the city of Ellensburg. And now I’m all set and legal to work on the rez. Off to work I go!

Howdy ya’ll I know it has been a while but life on the Northern Plains has been pretty busy.  After leaving the job in Wyoming that got shut down I’m back in North Dakota. Let me tell you it’s a lot colder here now than the last time I was here.  it snowed about four inches here and let me tell you it makes the place look a whole lot prettier!

Things have been very busy here. Had a great feast for thanksgiving with 5 birds!  My awesome coworker and I cooked it all up with lot so of help from the guys. We wound up feeding something like 35 people. Not everyone gets to go home for the holidays so we make do the best week can. It wasn’t as exotic and the snow crab they serve in Alaska but it was hearty and kept the cold at bay. Did I mention that its winter here in ND? Yeah it’s cold! Has not gotten above freezing in over a week.

When I’m not busy decorating for Christmas, we are drilling wells that are very exciting.  I was just on a project that was doing something I had never heard off before. A three mile lateral! That means that after drilling down two miles then drill sideways for three miles!!! I believe they are some of the record setting wells for length.  It’s amazing to think that we can have five miles worth of drill pipe in the ground and still be able to steer it.  This one was drilled under a lake. I could see it from the shakers when I go to get a sample. Pretty cool.

The other exciting project I was on recently was a short 2 mile lateral but it had this crazy curve where we had to swing extra wide to get in the right spot. Has to do with land rights. But basically the rig was in one township section and we were drilling down the middle of the section next to us.  If you made a model of the turn it would look like some kind of weird modern art sculptor with one long section between two curves both going in different directions.

 

 

 

Not all wells are created equal. Sometimes we have a well that is a real barn burner and sometimes we have a dry well. I personally have only ever been on one well that was completely dry meaning no gas, no oil, nothing. This is my first P&A well.  P&A stands for Plug and Abandon. It means we are calling it quits before we make it to complication.  Once the call has been made (took over 5 days of sitting around doing nothing on this well) the process sounds very simple fill the hole completely with cement and leave.

The actual is a little more complicated. In the end it results in several days of us sitting around doing nothing.  After sitting around for four days the plan from on high finally came down. There will be a total of seven different cement pugs in the hole when we are done separated by treated salt water spacers.  To pump a cement job like this takes a bunch of trucks and pumps but all off the action happens underground so unfortunately it’s not a very photogenic operation.  It is noisy however! We are currently on the second of seven.

Not only is this a P&A of this well but the other wells that where planed have been cancelled as well. The rock just didn’t show enough promise. The formation wasn’t economically viable. There is something down there but it’s just too hard to get at right now with this technology.  This is how it goes sometimes. In the future the technology might be better and be able to get more out of this well or formation.  It has happened before where the field was considered dead.  With new technology like fracking it was able to breathe new life into the field.

As far as the science of this great big science experiment goes we collected lots of great data. From mutable types of cuttings, over 6 boxes of gas samples, to countless logs. All of this date will be scrutinized very closely all winter long and maybe someday we will come back and drill thru the cement and start again.

The worst part of being on a P&A is that the rest of the projects are cancelled too. That means I have no idea where I’m headed next!

I have been in Wyoming for three weeks now and been on the same number of wells. The first week was wrapping up a well near Buffalo. With 2,000 ft left it took longer than it should have. From there I was off a well somewhere between Midwest and Bill Wyoming, wherever that is!  And now I am on a well two hours west of Gillette. With all this driving around I have gotten to see some pretty impressive vistas.

The second rig was particularly far from anywhere. Took me a good three hours on dirt roads in the mud to get there. These dirt roads are special because the ranchers have imposed speed limits of 20MPH and have the ability to get you run off if you speed all because of these guys:

So needless to say I was glad I had stocked up on food in town before I headed out there.  Food is always a highlight of life on a rig; especially when it’s free and already made. We got lucky last week, two ladies in a big Ford pickup rolled up to the rig. Clearly not rig people (no safety gear, not parking the right way) but they come with 35 plates worth of food for our rig. The problem is no one knows who sent the food! We ate it anyway. And it was delicious! Best BBQ I have had in Wyoming.

By the third week I’m off to the third well the worst part about leaving this rig was that halfway down the road I remembered that I had left my one good Tupperware container with the last of my curry in the fridge!!! Noooo!!! So here I am on the third rig without my curry and without my Tupperware. I have nothing to put my leftover chicken enchiladas in tonight.

The weather has been flip-flopping between nice warm days where the snakes come out (7 in 2 hours at one rig) and cold rainy days where if it was ten degrees colder it would be snowing.  And now it is currently hailing.

This job and this industry always has a high rate of uncertainty but after being back to work for a week it seems things have gotten way out of hand.  Take this job as a case study. On the books it’s going to be 6 holes drilled by 2 rigs as pure scientific exploration for a larger company that I will not name.  The first rig is up and running, working on the first hole. The second rig was supposed to come on line in early September.  The possibility of a third rig coming up at some point. Well it is now almost November and the second rig is still three weeks away from coming on line. If it comes on line at all. Odds are low in my opinion seeing as they don’t even have a rig contracted yet.  This leads to all kinds of problems for equipment and personal to say the least!  Take our crew for example.  Before I arrived I was told that I would be replacing the night hand who would then go to the second rig. When I arrived it turned the night had wasn’t going to leave tell the job was done. Ok fine no big deal. That’s only 2,000’ to go. Should be done in a shift.  Three days later they finally finish! I wound up working three shifts with a new coworker witch is always fun and a learning experience we try to trade knowledge and get to know each other but this time it was practically impossible!

To be fair you have to have few screws loose or missing to do this job but I have never meet such a scattered brained person in my life!  Words cannot even begin to describe the less then controlled chaos I walked in to.  I have spent the last 4 days trying to figure out all the paperwork and get it in order. The day hand is so impressed with the way I’m cleaning things up he has made it clear to the boss that he wants no one else out here.  Sometimes being the new face pays off and sometimes just being enough of a contrast is all it takes.  So out of the confusion and chaos good things come.

So here I sit on the rig watching them run logs and maybe soon new will start casing and then I will be moving on to who knows where. Uncertainty abounds. But I do know this it is beautiful her in Wyoming right now. The Mountains have snow and the fall foliage is popping in bright color.  The dear and antelope have picked a great spot to roam.  The prairie dogs and snakes are trying to soak up the last rays of summer. 75 today but snow in the forecast for next week!  After being off for two weeks it’s good to be back to work.  Time to work hard so I can play harder latter!

After what seems like months of crazy stressful nights I finally get a break. We finish our last well and skidded the rig over 30 ft. to do the next well. We have so far finished half of that second well without problems. Until today that is, with just over 10,000 ft to go.

Tonight’s problem is from the fact that when we ran our casing, (to keep the whole from collapsing while we do the lateral section) 600 barrels of mud and all of our cement disappeared!!! It’s a little hard to lose that much fluid but it does happen. When the casing was being run to bottom one of the many formations started to push back, in what is called a squeeze. When the formation squeezes the hole there isn’t any room between the pipe and the wall so that means there is no space for the mud and cement to return to surface.  With no way out the pressure builds and builds and eventually finds the path of least resistance.  We just don’t know where that is.  It could have traveled along a fracture  or fault in the rock, the formation could have absorbed some of it, it may be trapped below a hard spot and spreading out slowly like a very lumpy balloon.  We don’t know where it went.  So now we are trying to figure out if enough cement is left in place for us to drill ahead.   To do that we are running a wire line in the well with a temperature probe.

Wire lining is when a probe or logging tool is lowered in to the hole with an electric cable, records data and then is pulled back out.  It can measure the temperature, density, or even the radioactivity of the rocks.   This time we are running a temperature probe because the cement we use to glue the outside of the casing to the rock gets hot, very hot, when it is curing. That is what we hope to see in the log. One problem that would prevent us from seeing that is that wireline tools normally only work to about a 55-60° angle, our well is currently at about a 90° angle.  We will find out soon if the tools can even get down to the point we need to see what we need to see.

If we can see the cement and there is enough of it we can drill ahead, do the lateral part of the well and be out of here in two or three days. But if there isn’t enough cement or we can’t see it we may be here for a while as they try different things. If the log comes back with evidence of cement but it is not enough or in the right spot the easy fix will be to do a second cement job and add more to the hole.  If we can’t get the probe down far enough to see or there is several hundred feet of cement in the hole we may have to drill thru it to bottom and then pump a second cement job. Neither is a good option.

In other news I think I am starting to get the hang of all the responsibilities of the new job!

After being on sight for five days I was all prepared to sit down and write about how much I hated the drive back to work OR to write about my screw up this week, with the company storage locker (I somehow lost the lock for it, story for another time)   BUT the biggest news of the day trumps all that!

 

Shortly before I clocked off yesterday morning we had some unusual pressure spikes and then the bit just stopped. Normally that would mean any number of things could be wrong with the BHA (Bottom Hole Assembly, the bit, the mud motor, and the gamma tools) no matter what the problem in almost always means we have to come out of the hole: a trip out.

When they got to the surface they discovered that the bit had sheared itself in about three places.  And looked something like this!:

Just for comparison this is what a good one looks like.

THAT’S NOT GOOD!!!!  So what happens now you ask? Well! Now that there are pieces of diamond studded titanium tungsten carbide in the bottom of the hole and we can’t drill forward tell those are out of the way we have to mill. That means we bring in a special bit that’s who purpose is to drill thru this stuff.  When the special bit get to the bottom it can take a very long time to mill or grind these pieces in to small enough chunks that they can be fished out with a basket (its exactly what you think, a claw type basket goes down and scoops up all the pieces it can) or can be pumped back to surface.  No matter what it will be a long night and possibly along few days.

Besides this things have been going well at the new site summer might be in full swing other places but I think it is over for North Dakota. It has been rainy and below 80 for the last few days. We live in a big mud puddle now but with all the fires out west we get great sunsets.

After being off for five days I can finally sit down and write about the last week of the well.  I can say this for the new job: it is definitely faster passed.

 

One of the questions I get asked the most once people find out I work on an oil rig is “How deep do you guys drill?” quickly followed up with something along the lines “That’s not all straight down is it?”.  The answer is far from simple. In this new to me basin or oil patch the formations are much, much, deeper than what I am use to.  There are 2 different pay zones as well.  The shallow one is the Middle Bakken. Depending on where in the state you are it can be anywhere from 9,000’ to 13,000’ strait down. (Just for reference 2 miles is 15,600 feet.) Most people have heard of the Bakken Shale. But I can now say that I have seen it. It’s a much larger formation and there are inter bedded silt stones and shale stones. The silt is easier to drill but the shale is where the good oil is at. The way they are doing most wells now is to drill the siltstone and then frack into the shale. So that’s what we did on this well. We drilled down two miles (building the curve as we went) and then drilled a ‘two section lateral’, fancy term just means we drilled sideways for two miles because we had the mineral rights to two of the mile by mile sections.

The truly new part of my job came when we finally started drilling sideways.  In the other places I’ve worked the formations have been very thick and forgiving.  That is not the case in North Dakota.  We were targeting a very small window of only about 10 vertical feet. On either side of this narrow window is shale. Shale is bad in this case, very bad. We do not want to hit the shale so we have to constantly readjust the angle we drill at so as not get out of zone. Think of trying to push a pencil through the filling layer of a layer cake without hitting the cake; but you don’t know if the cake is on a level plate or if half of it is tilted this way or that.  It’s my job to make sure we stay in the filling even when the bit is two miles below the prairie and 2 miles away from the rig.                                                            No pressure.

This well went smoothly and we didn’t have any problems. The formations where not flat like a layered cake but we managed to stay right on track.  A few ups and downs but that’s why they have us on location so we can tell everyone in real time what is changing.  I was very shocked with how fast we drilled the horizontal.  To drill over 15,000’ it took us two and a half days. That’s it! That may not seem shocking but just realize that in 2014 that would have taken 35 days.  There is nothing particularly special that we do now verses then. They just have figured out what works. The right drill bit and mud motor combination makes a huge difference. Finding the right spot in the formation never hurts too.

After such a fast wrap up I drove for two days across Montana and am now relaxing in my hammock in Vancouver.  I expect to be called back to work at any time but for now it’s time to cram as much summer in as I can stand!

 

I finally had to leave the bad lands behind and head for my new rig on Wednesday.  We have been drilling ever since.  After a week of in the field training I am holding my own tower again.  (A tower is a 12 hour sift normally 6 to 6.) They gave me the night shift knowing full well more things go wrong on the night shift than any other time.  I have been learning things left and right trying to learn everything I can about the new job. We are working on a short term project so that means we are starting from scratch on everything so we are rigging up for the first time a lot of things that on most jobs are already set.

About 80% of this job is stuff I have done before. One of the old friends I ran into the night before last was a gas trap that decided not to work. After tearing it apart and putting it back together about three times it turned out to be a problem with the electrical outlet we were plugging into and moving out the plug fixed it.       It was a simple fix but after lots of frustration.

One of the new things I’m learning is the samples in this area. I have never seen a rock called anhydrite before.  Basically its gypsum without the water. It’s an evaporate and if you add water to it will swell like crazy. Because we drill thru several formations of it and several salt beds we drill with this very nasty mud that’s somewhere between regular mud and oil based mud. Its nasty stuff and makes it almost impossible to get the samples clean. Luckily we have a few tricks that help like washing the samples with diesel.

 

                                                                        (This is some of the bigger chunks that came out as pop off)

The biggest change to this job is that I am now responsible for predicting and calling the formation tops as they come in which will lead to me changing the target depth. Talk about pressure! If I pick the wrong spot for a formation we can screw up the whole rig operations in the blink of an eye. So to a void that we spend hours poring over logs of nearby wells and any information we can about what is down hole. The most useful tool we use is results from the gamma ray.  Basically the MWD guys send a radioactive recorder down the whole with the pipe. It records the different readings of the rock and sends it to the surface where we look at it.  To the untrained eye it looks like a bunch of squiggles (and in reality it totally is).  I’m plying match the picture, like off the kids menu, with these squiggles. We want to match up, or correlate as we say in the business, the lines from this well with the lines with that well. It can be very frustrating and tedious but when it clicks it’s awesome!

 

                                                                   (About three sets of the squiggles)

Another old friend is my coworker Matt. We worked together in Oklahoma for about a month and now here we are in North Dakota! We work very well together and it makes learning the new stuff easier.  Another new thing is just how shockingly nice the living accommodations are I haven’t seen anything this nice since I left Spy Island, and in fact this might be better.

This job was bit of a pay increase for me but it is definitely a lot more stressful and I am earning every single penny of it. I think today is the first day that was a 14+ hour day.  I don’t want to say I love it because something will break but it is, without a doubt, the challenge I was looking for. I’m sure i will hate it in a week but for now I’ll take it.

As I take my evening walk it is a particularly beautiful evening. The sun is setting in a blaze of glory to left painting the clouds and the Bad Lands in color. I know I use blaze a lot but it really is the only word to describe a sunset like this:

The beginnings of a grass land fire are blazing to life to my right making the underside of the clouds glow. The blowing wind makes the grass rustle and the prairie sing.

The dark storm clouds drop a few scattered rain drops.  The birds are chirping away happily and a lone coyote calls in the distance. In short a picture perfect evening. One you can’t find many places.

Because of this job I have gotten to see some pretty amazing places. Yes, this job has a lot of down sides and it isn’t for everyone. Some people work this job and go to town every spare moment they can just to get away from it all. They never stop and take a moment to enjoy the awesomeness around them. Not just the natural beauty that mother mature has worked so hard to create, but the technology too. We have the ability now to drill two miles down AND over two miles sideways. I guarantee the first oil men never dreamed of such things. It truly is a wondrous time we live in.  This job sucks a lot of the time but when a sun set like this comes along it makes me grateful and apparently makes me wax poetic. I will miss this location when I have to move on in a few days.