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.