Author: Becky

I wasn’t sure what to write about for the last few days.    I am working on a rig near kingfisher, OK and things are going as smoothly as they can (knock on wood). It’s more of same but that doesn’t make for interesting posts.

Lately I have been reading the journals of Captain Robert F. Scott the Antarctic explorer. Every journal entry starts off the same way with the weather report and how many miles they had traveled that day. So I thought I would give it a try. Here it is the oil field by the numbers.

Monday the 24th of April, 2017. Weather today is partly cloudy and windy. 72 degreases with a 7 mph wind out of the southeast.

From my trailer I can see 4 rigs not counting my own. Rigs are like little kids playing soccer. Sometimes they group together and fallow each other around and sometimes they spread out and not be near each other for months. Today we happen to me in a popular area.

On a normal day one rig employees ruffly 25 people divided between two 12 hour shifts. That is not counting all the truck drivers, trailer delivers, cement crews, crane operators, Welders, and others that come to rig at different stages. So daily average of 25 people on location. I can see 4 other rigs so between the five rigs there are ruffly 125 people employed right now.

 

A typical hole takes anywhere from 4 to 60 days to drill. With an average depth of 15,000 ft. Now when I say that don’t think of a hole going straight down. Most holes are drilled with some kind of sideways component. So it winds up looking like a sloppy L.

In the US today there are 847 rigs working.
The price of oil is $t1.84 a barrel.
Price of gas in Oklahoma is $1.97 a gallon.
I have been in country for 47 days (and have 14 more to go) I had already worked on 5 different holes.

All the numbers I have for today!

After the most intestine week of training ever, I got to ride on a helicopter to quite literally the middle of nowhere. The flight was over cold water so that means we had to suit up in our cold water survival suits. They do not make for the most comfortable of fight wear. The loading and disembarking are very tricky and well coordinated operations.
When we landed I meet up with the person I would be replacing and handed off my life jacket. We had a very charming 3 second conversation as the helicopter in the background continued to run. After we where led inside I was given a platform orientation and tour.

The accommodations is a where the dorm style living happens. Two beds per room, lead your dirty laundry outside the door before you go to sleep and it will be back in the morning, here’s the galley only open for 4 means a day. The rec. room with pool table, darts, and TVs. The outside is where things get interesting. Fist there is the lifeboat stations. When there is a drill got to the right boat with your survival suit.

The main deck is where I started to recognize things from my land based rigs. The main deck was huge and covered in stacks of pipe and shipping containers. Two big cranes move things around daily and right in the middle of the deck was a rig. It seamed much bigger then the rigs I was use too.

The Derik was taller and the floor and the dog house where very different. The dog house was an explosion proof box. Everything off shore has to be explosion proof. When I finally got to my work spot it was very different too.. To get in you had to pass thru an airlock set of doors. It had running water in the unit and lots of counters space. But most notably it had close to 20 computers in there with different displaces. All showing something different happening on the rig.

I made friends fast and got to know as many people as a could. The cooks by far where the best. We are off the cost of Scotland but very much an international community. The cooks where from Scotland. And one night I walk in to get my midnight meal (lunch) and the cook asks me where I’m from and I tell him. He then slams down his spoon and says in a very think accent “Damn it! Isn’t there anyone from this side of the pond in here tonight? Nothing but yanks and Canadians” Apparently the Canadians had gone thru the line ahead of me and no one else had come to lunch yet.

My coworkers for the two weeks where as absolutely amazing. They came from all over and had great stories about life offshore. They were nice enough to play darts with me after shift. And when I got pack to shore one of them took me out on the town in Aberdeen and we had a great time. In Aberdeen there is a church that has been turned into a bar. If you ever get the chance you should check it out.

BUT the single most amazing thing was tea time. Twice a shift (total of four times a day) the whole rig would shut down. All drilling would more or less stop. Everyone would go to one of two brake rooms. Smoking and nonsmoking. There would be fresh pastries, cookies, snacks, and hot tea. The smoking shack always got the better stacks but no one was ever in the non smoking one so you could take as much as you wanted. We even had a kettle in our work unit. For 10 minutes twice a day everyone would stop working and have tea and snacks. Best part of the day hands down. In my option it made us work harder and was good for morale. Truly the best idea ever.

I as I sit here at the company house I’m am reanimating about the the places I have worked and the people I have meet. Facebook reminded me that this week three years ago, I was working in Scotland. That was a great hitch!

In Scotland all the oil is off shore in the North Sea. In order to get to the rigs you have to take a helicopter, in order to do that you have to take a safety corse. This is not your typical safety corse like the one I had to take today where they sit you down and you do lots of paperwork and som guy stands there and talks for eight hours. No no no. This is the most intensive training ever! It starts of with the paperwork but with a twist. We learn all about the terrible explosion in the North Sea in 1988, called Piper Alpha. (Talk about mind-blowing) sort version of Piper Alpha story is a production platform in the North Sea was undergoing some repairs. One of the pumps was disabled and off line and a steel plate was left to cover the pressure sensor hole. At some point in the night the other pump stopped working due to build up of flammable ice. The pump with no pressure gage was turned on with in minutes there was an explosion fallowed latter by a second explosion and all hell broke lose. In the end 61 men survived out of 226. If you want to read more which I totally recommend doing here is the Wikipedia page:      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha

After that terrifying start to a training session then you get to play with all kinds of awesome things. I even got to use a fire extinguisher on a fire! We also learned how to deploy a life raft and water survival skills for a cold water disaster. After all this fun in the freezing cold pool the last day of class roles around and they’re truly save the best for last.

On the last day of training we suit up in our cold water survival suits. These things are bulky and huge and yellow. And never fit right. The cuffs are all sealed and it’s a real pain to get in. It takes a good 10 minutes and team work to get into. Once you are in and sweaty (so sweaty) you go to the edge of the pool and are issued a life jacket with a rebreather (if you have the time before the crash you take a big breath and fill a pouch with air). Then you get in a helicopter simulator. It looks like a mutilated shipping container. There is no back to the thing and there are “Windows” and a door. There is no glass in the windows and no door in the frame. It’s on this huge arm that can lift it turn it and flip it upside down.
The first group goes up and sits down in the seats in side. Everyone straps in to the most complicated seatbelt ever known to man. This is all out side the pool. “Everyone in? ok now un strap and get out.” Not hard not complicated. Easy. That represents “a ground landing with out fire” next everyone back in strap in. Here we go up and over to the pool. Where they set the helicopter down and it sits on the surface of the water. “Controlled water landing” so it goes on from there each time adding another level so by the 7th time the windows are in and you have your rebreather and your seatbelt and everything. They turn you upside down and dunk you in to the pool. To get out you have to wait 7 seconds (so the blades stop spinning) nock out the window with your elbow climb thru it and swim to the surface. At this point for the one and only time you get to pull that magical red cord on your life vest that the fight attendants have told us about for years. At this point you would think the fun is all over but wait there’s more! Now you have too swim with this inflated life vest to the life raft and climb in. I can honestly say that is is the most undignified and most difficult thing I have ever done.

So after that any training corse will naturally pail in compression. After that amazing week I got to ride in a helicopter for real as they sent me out to work on a jack up rig for two weeks. And no we did not crash.

After a week of slowly drilling with beautiful sunshine the weather turns gray and we finish drilling.

After a week of this

It turns to this

After a week of low activity it was a mad dash to rig down and as predicted it was in the rain and the mud. It’s always socking to go from working to rigging down with out any kind of break. I didn’t even have my last sample before we started rigging down. It was so fast that Arty the Artic Fox didn’t even get to come visit. Maybe next well. Now it’s back to civilization for a week.

 

More after sleep.

Few weeks ago I filled in at rig that was in windmill country for two days. It use to be easy to spot the rigs. Look for the tallest thing on the land. Now its almost impossible to see them thru all the windmills.

Everyone thinks windmills are clean and efficient and the better way to go for energy. The closer you get to one you notice a few things.

First off they are huge!!!! Second, you can see the bird strikes up and down the post. Then you notice how quite they are. At night if they don’t flash you don’t know they are there at all. Like ghosts.

And then you look closer and see the oil dripping off the turbine and realize these take more petroleum products to make and operate then they replace.

They do make for some interesting photos. Especially when the thunderstorms blow by…

There are very few things in this world that I am a loyal name brand name customer of. The one that I will never give up is my Dawn dish soap. It really is the best thing ever. From making bubbles in a fountain to cleaning greasy pans nothing comes close it. I love it because it is the ONLY thing that cleans oil based mud.

After working with the samples, the oil based mud, and the dispel it’s the only thing that can get my hands clean enough to eat a sandwich. Oil based mud is particularly nasty stuff. It doesn’t matter what you do it gets everywhere! On your clothes and hands and the worst part is the smell. It gets in your nose and you can’t get ride of it. (But to me it smells like a job well done) When we catch a sample we have to wash it in diesel to get the OBM off. Diesel is the only thing that can come close to washing the mud off. I would say getting the samples clean but it’s just trading one coating for another. You can imagine how nasty my hands get in a matter of minutes. By the end of the night the whole trailer and I smell like oil and diesel! I reach for the bottle of dawn. I can’t show you what my hands looked like before because I don’t dare touch anything but after you can’t even tell I played in the mud.

Tonight’s excitement consisted of doing delicate electrical work in the dark. Changing plugs on some of our equipment. One of the many reasons this job can never fit on a resume. Hands where completely covered in grease and oil and dirt but after a wash with Dawn I feel human again.

If I ever drive for NASCAR I want Dawn to be my sponsor. You know why Dawn gets to have all those cute commercials with the birds covered in oil and how Dawn cleans them all up? Well they get to have those commercials because they are true! It totally works.

There product placement finished.   😜

 

Tonight we are on casing. So every so often we had to add casing to the whole to keep it from collapsing. After the casing is in the hole it is cemented in place and then we go back to drilling with a smaller pipe. It winds up being a stair stepped down layered thing.

So on slow nights there is only three things to do! Eat, sleep, and work out.

I all ready slept all day and worked out so I’m making an amazing curry for dinner.

After what felt like ever (was only a week) I am back to work!  Woooot!

I spent a week in town and spent a lot of it sleeping and the rest of it spending money. Anyone who has worked a job like this can relate. We don’t spread our spending out a little here a little there. Nope! It’s more like we don’t buy anything for six months and then when we are in town surrounded by all the flashing lights and pretty things we buy it all at once! So let me tell you I am glad to be back on the rig! (Goodies include new running shoes and arts and craft stuff)

This job/lifestyle is a lot like the army, in that we do a fair amount of hurry up and wait. As a result when the call finally does come in to go to work it is always a last minute scramble. The check lists of get out the door consists of things like making sure you have everything you unpacked to make wherever you’ve crashed comfortable, trying to find the rig on the map so you know where to go, and the most important, stoping at the last grocery store before the rig so you can stock up.

When I finally get to rig it’s rig up time! Rig up is just the opposite of rig down. We plug everything in and make sure nothing got stolen or broken. After the computers and lights the most important thing is the gas line and trap. This is what we use to measure the gas in the mud. It doesn’t matter what time of day you show up you almost always wind up running the little plastic tube we call polyflow in the dark and the mud. Nothing says fun like a new role of polyflow, a sharp knife, and a new role of electrical tape.

The trick to running a good line is keeping it out of places it might get cut, punctured, ripped, run over or walked on too many times. To do that successfully requires crawling under trailers and playing in the mud and a touch of creativity. It has to go from our trailer to the crossing where the cables and other wires of the rig are protected from the car and truck traffic. From there it has to get to the possum belly. There is a surprising amount of wires and nooks and crannies on a rig and sometimes the line has to go up and over and get taped in place. Some times it goes low and get tucked under generators and in all kinds of places. As long as there is nothing sharp and it’s not going to get ripped, odds are we have run polyflow thru it. Once this part of the job is done it’s all down hill. The only thing left is to carry the 50 pound gas trap up and plug it in. Then it’s all computer work. And then back to the waiting.

So there we are the mad rush to get it all set up and rigged up on time is done and now we drill on! (They have been drilling for a few days without us already) Raining here tonight in Oklahoma but no thunderstorms.

After my rig finished up last week I was at lose ends. While killing time at the company house in Norman I enjoyed the advantages of town. Having such as adventures as getting the car washed, oil changed, and windows tinted.

Before

After

It feels like a whole new car! It’s like driving a cave!

The best part is now I finally have a worthy place for the awesome sticker I was given last summer. This sticker has travels to Italy and back and now gets to see all of Oklahoma. Who knew it would go so many places!

In the oil field excitement creates excitement. So I left off last week with the mud story. Well after that fallowed 42 hours of very high intensity excitement. The well was close to finishing or as we say TDing. TD stands for total drilled. And can be used as a noun and a verb. “What’s TD?” “When did we TD?” “We TDed yet?” Etc.

As a well gets close to TDing it’s our job to watch the samples extra hard to make sure nothing goes wrong. Make sure we stay in the target zone and don’t cross any faults or formations or anything weird.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened with this one. We hit something that wasn’t what we wanted. Thus we were scrambling and talking with everyone from the company man to the directional guys, to the geologist in town, trying to figure out what we where in. But after what seamed like hours of this, it didn’t really matter anyway because the end result was the same. We where TDed. Done. Finished. Now most people would think that means the work is done. In a way it is, but before we can leave or be truly done two things have to happen. The company man has to say we can go, and then we have to rig down all of our equipment.

A few hours after TD we were released. Then the heavy lifting started. First it’s computer stuff send the final reports. Then it’s pack up the microscope and everything else on the counters. If it’s not bolted down it needs to get packed up. That can take hours! Look around you right now. If the room your sitting in was about to be pulled down the highway at 50 miles an hour what would fall over? Everything? Yeah… That’s why all of it must get packed away.

After that then there is still the out side to rig down. That means going and getting the gas trap and power washing the three inches of mud off of it before dragging it back to the trailer.

Cleaning the sample trailer and making sure it is all strapped down. Pulling the gas line. (Not like the gas line that feeds your house. This is about a quarter of an inch in diameter hard plastic tube) Once everything is unplugged and strapped in its time to clean up and load up your personal stuff.

So after everything is loaded, cleaned, packed, strapped, and good to go it’s time to head….. Somewhere. The locals head home for a few hard-earned days of R&R. But people like me without friends and family nearby have a different option. I called the boss looking for work but sad to say there was no work to be had just then. So I was off to the company bunk house.

Now company bunk houses can be anything from a extra trailer at the office, to an apartment, to a hotel room, to a real house. Most of the time they are over used and under cleaned and full of someone-who-nolonger-works-here’s stuff. This time I got supper lucky. After the down turn the company got ride of the old apartment and now uses on of the boss’s spare houses as a bunk house. This house was not originally meant to hold smelly oilfield workers so it’s supper nice! More bathrooms and bedrooms then you can shake a stick at. The backyard is a pool. And when your by yourself it’s supper creepy. It does have this supper pretty tree that is in full color.

I am the only house guest. I make my self at home as much as I dare. (Put like three things in the fridge and sit on the very edge of the couch not touching anything) The best part is that I’m in town and don’t have to work!

I try to sleep as much as I can but that just screws up my sleep schedule. So I take the opportunity to do some much needed shopping. Everything from Christmas gifts to arts and crafts stuff.  At fist it’s great! Everyone speaks English and they are just so friendly, but after getting a car wash and an oil change I have had enough of people and the world and head back to sleep some more.

Of course after I wash my car it thunderstorms and drops all kinds of junk on the car. Grrr.

So after two days of hanging around the house and not having any work, a coworker shows up who has just finished a well in Kansas. YAY COMPANY! Not three hours after he is there he gets a message from his normal rig that they will be at logging depth on the fallowing day.  He doesn’t have a night hand. Sometimes it pays off to be the one crashing at the bunk house. I’m the only person free so I get the job for a few days.

So after I was finally getting settled in I load everything back up and head out stopping of corse to get the car washed again! It’s a losing battle but we at least have to try.
Back to the rigs!