End of Well

We should be finishing up this well sometime tonight and probably getting underway tomorrow. That means I’ll be even more busy (with less time to blog) than usual.

I’m not used to these drilling rigs yet. I’ve only been doing it off and on for the last couple of years. I’m a mariner, not a driller. 😉

I do find it amazing how fast they get the job done on these rigs over here in Africa. In the Gulf of Mexico (GoM), I seem to remember it taking many months to drill a well.

Here it seems to take them only a few weeks. I’m sure part of the reason is that these ships are the latest and greatest (so far)- 6th generation dual derrick drill ships. They can use both derricks at once, that saves them a LOT of time.

Ocean Rig Olympia

Ocean Rig Olympia

I hear this next job will only take a week or so. That one is only putting down the ‘top-hole’, it’s not the same thing as drilling a well.

This kind of work keeps me MUCH more busy than I usually am offshore. I’m learning a lot, which is always good. I just hope it doesn’t get too stressful (it’s ALWAYS stressful when we’re moving).

It should only take us a couple of hours to get there once we finally get underway. The new well is only about 12 miles from where we’re at right now. What takes time is getting underway and then getting set up again once we reach our new location.

Our drillers and subsea guys have to pick up all the riser and the BOP. We (DPOs and ROV guys) have to pick up all our transponders and then secure our transducer poles for our acoustic reference system. All that can take quite a while.

When we get to our new location, we have to do all that in reverse. We will also spend a lot of time and effort to calibrate all our equipment so that it all works as well as possible.

I’m looking forward to the move, but a little nervous too. :-/

PS- I was on the Olympia last hitch, but these are not my photos, (I got them from googling “drillships”)

Climate Activists, Eco-Terrorism, and the Green Scare

Climate Activists, Eco-Terrorism, and the Green Scare – Politics – Utne Reader.

Another great article from Utne Reader. I really love that magazine, even tho I usually don’t agree with how they state the problem or the solutions they come up with. They are usually VERY statist and I am the opposite. Sometimes they are communitarian (people choosing to live together in a voluntary manner and helping each other by CHOICE), which I DO agree with and support. There is a world of difference between voluntary cooperation and all other systems which are based on force. I will not support any of those in any way (which includes “our” system here in the USA now, since it has utterly violated the original constitution set up and intended to PROTECT our rights, and instead it now constantly violates them).

As for the article, it reports on the usual cooperation between big government and big business to keep the people in their places. Lots of spying on anyone engaged in community organizing or otherwise politically active by both private companies and government to benefit the corporations . Of course, this damages the ability to get anything useful done. They talk a lot about fracking specifically but also mention the Keystone pipeline and animal rights, factory farming,etc. I really can’t say I’ve made up my mind which side of the fracking issue I’ll take.

I DO like the fact that it is helping us get off the Arabic tit and become energy independent again. I like that very much! I would LOVE to be able to say to the entire Middle East to go jump in a lake! They’ve had us over the barrel (of oil) for so long and we’ve been sucking up to them for years because of it. We spend BILLIONS of dollars “protecting” their countries so we can get access to that oil. I say let them keep their oil! We should’ve spent all those billions developing alternative energy all those years and we’d be a HELL of a lot better off by now.

So, now our oil people have come up with directional drilling and fracking to get more of our own oil out of the ground. I’m happy about that. Lets concentrate on making fracking safer, if the environmentalists concerns about groundwater pollution are valid, we need to fix that problem somehow before we continue fracking near any problem areas. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, lets FIX the specific problems with fracking and use it for our benefit. Since we have NOT developed our alternative energy supplies to where they’re anywhere near competitive yet, it gives us some control over our foreign policy again, IF our politicians will just THINK about things and do whats right for the country for once instead of being their own usual greedy pandering selves.

I would LOVE to see solar, wind, geothermal, ocean current, fuel cell technology become as efficient and affordable as fossil fuels. Is any of that going to happen in my lifetime??? In the meantime, we CAN get affordable, politically cheap oil- (meaning NOT located in some foreign country where they all hate us). I say go for it.

As to the environmentalists and other critics of fracking, I want to know just what exactly are THEIR solutions to the issue of our need for energy? I’ve already heard about their ideas that we all go back to living off the land. Yeah, well, I agree with that but don’t think that’s at all possible unless and until we’re ready to eliminate at least a few billion of us humans off the face of the earth. Birth control would be my preferred method, space colonization would work for me just fine, our so-called leaders would prefer we kill each other off in expensive wars, and mother earth will probably do it with some sort of plague sooner or later.

OK, so what OTHER solutions are there???

RIGZONE – Career Spotlight: Petroleum Engineers

RIGZONE – Career Spotlight: Petroleum Engineers.

If I had really thought about it, I would have gone into something like this instead of Chemical Engineering when I went back to school. I only did Chemical cause I live in Lake Jackson, Texas, near Houston. The whole area is a huge center of chemical plants, Dow, BASF, Shintech, etc. I figured I would always be able to get a good job. I only went back to school to make my grandmother happy. I already had a good career (and an AAS degree) and figured if I went back to school it better be for something that would pay the bills better than what I was doing already (working offshore as captain of supply boats, etc). I didn’t really understand what exactly Chemical Engineers did 🙁

I wound up getting a degree in Math, just so I could get out of school and back to work doing something I still really loved (offshore running boats). Petroleum Engineers work offshore a lot and it seems I probably could have found work as a reservoir engineer if I had really tried hard using the math degree. I wasn’t really all that interested in it tho. I was much more interested in getting back out on a boat 😉 I did manage to do that pretty quickly after I got my degree. I’d been working throughout school, summers, holidays,etc so it wasn’t really an issue.

Now that the oilfield is booming again, they need these Petroleum Engineers, along with geologists, etc. I had 2 lady geologists out on my rig last hitch and at least one ‘mud engineer’. The real demand is for subsea engineers. Maybe Rigzone will post an article about that soon. That seems to be pretty interesting. Actually, all of it is interesting, its just a little bit different angles of attacking the problem. Finding out whats down there, how to get at it, how to put it to use…