Saturday

2 am comes quickly. I get up and immediately notice that David hasn’t come back and gone to bed. This is a bad sign, he was planning on going to sleep at around 12 and leaving Paula by herself for a few hours.  I come to the work trailer and sure enough, they’ve been having more problems. In the few hours I was sleeping they changed more cables and did everything they could think of. At one point they gave up and told Pemex to stop drilling and bring the tools back to surface. Lucky for us, they decided to keep drilling and the problem once again mysteriously disappeared.

I arrive in time to see the end of their hard work. We have good data and good signal. I send David to bed. They get stuck briefly, but manage to unstuck the drillstring pretty quickly. This is a good thing. Getting the drillstring stuck often means our tools get lost in the well if they can’t get unstuck.  It’s expensive, time consuming and stressful.  I’m on high alert for further signs that the well is going to cave in on itself and take our tools with it. Then I send Paula to bed.

Without problems, this is an easy job only requiring one person on shift at a time. I can sit and monitor drilling operations from my computer. Make my reports. Write. Read. Watch a movie. The last few days have not been easy. Even this morning I feel the effects of little sleep and a lot of stress weighting down my mind and my body. The generators, which we are unfortunately right next to, cause a constant roar that makes it hard to stand being in the trailer. We wear earplugs inside and have to talk with raised voices and occasional hand gestures (polite ones of course).

Friday

I wake up at 2 am Friday morning with Paula telling me it’s time to calibrate. I get dressed fast and grab the stuff from the trailer.  This calibration is for our depth tracking sensor.  Depth is really important to what we do because the tool doesn’t know what depth it’s at. It only knows what time it is. Our surface system keeps track of what time matches what depth. That way, when the tool sending information, the computer can match the time with the depth.

This means we have to keep close track of depth. Starting first with calibrating properly the sensor.  This requires two people, one at the computer and one on the rig floor. Since last time Paula was on the rig floor and I was on the computer, we switch. I go up to the floor and attach a tape measure to the top drive. The top drive is the part of the rig that moves the pipe up and down inside the derrick. When you think of a rig, you’re thinking of the derrick which reaches up 100 ft or more.

I have the driller move the top drive up and down and take the right measurements, sending them to Paula to input in the computer as I do. I get covered in mud as it drips down the pipe onto my hard hat and back.  When I’m finished the driller tells me I have mud all over my face. We start to test the tool again. I’m fully expecting it to work perfectly, but Paula comes and tells me we have no signal. We start troubleshooting. By now it’s about 3:30am. We wake up David and try everything we can think of. Eventually we get signal we are satisfied with. I’m not convinced it will work at bottom, but at this point there’s nothing left to do. We send Paula to bed since she’s been up for a long time and is obviously tired. 

In that time we’ve arrived at bottom and are preparing to turn the tools on and start collecting data. I’m not surprised when the problem is even worse.  We again start troubleshooting. It seems like every fix we try makes it better for about 10 mins and then it gets worse again.  We have our Operations Support Center (OSC) working on the problem alongside us.  Finally the Pemex engineer comes and tells us we’re going back up the hole, to the casing shoe.  There’s less risk when you’re in the casing shoe because here the hole is enclosed in steel and not likely to collapse around you. The trip up to the casing shoe is a sign of defeat. We’ve lost a lot of time and our client is not very happy with us. We’ve ordered back up parts for Villahermosa so we can try again to fix the problem when they arrive.

Thursday

Thursday starts with attending the crew change meeting. My first few meetings I went to, almost a year ago, were very intimidating. Since then I’ve mostly gotten over this, but on occasion I still get nervous going into them.  For whatever reason this is one of those meetings. Maybe it’s because the doghouse (drillers cabin on the rig floor) is very small to cram 10 men and me in or maybe it’s the bikini clad woman taped on the door.  Whatever it is, I’m not excited about this meeting. Luckily the questions are few. What flow rate do we want to test our tool with. Finally we can start.

Bottom hole assembly pick up can take hours. It used to be one of my favorite parts of my job, although why is still hard to explain.  We work hard to get to this point and once it’s all done, we get to sleep and relax for a few hours. Maybe it’s the promise of sleep. Whatever it is, it’s exciting.  As I’ve done more and more BHA pickups, the excitement has worn off, but there’s still something about controlling the floor, giving instruction to connect thousands of pounds of steel, watching it go away and hoping it all works like it’s supposed to. Maybe it’s just the control freak in me.

In this case, nothing seems to work like it’s supposed to. While standing in the work trailer, about to head up to the drilling floor, the power goes out on Paula and I.  We figure the generator ran out of diesel so we go to fill it back up again.  It quickly becomes obvious that we have no diesel.  I ask David if they filled the tank the day before and we eventually conclude that about 200L (53gals) of diesel has been stolen from our tank. Our trailer is hot, dark, and full of bugs. We have a backup power supply (UPS), but it won’t last for long and we need power to test our tools in a few short hours.  I stand on the floor while David tries to find some diesel.

Wednesday

Wednesday starts at 12:01 with us still working out where to lay our cables on the rig.  During the time it took to get the permission to start working, David comes to us and tells us that they can’t put the work trailer in the original location we thought.  This changes how we decide to rig up our sensors.  Everything connects to a box that we lay usually at the bottom of the rig.  Then we run a cable from that box to our trailer. But if the box and the trailer are further away than our cable will reach, then we have to change the location of the box. We decide it will probably work but decide to run the cable to the trailer first just in case it’s too far. 

Luckily, we have just enough cable to get to the trailer. This is a relief for us because our box location means the other cables will be very easy to lay.  If we changed the box location we would have a much more difficult time with the other cables.

During this entire time, our food has been sitting in our van without refrigeration while they work on installing the generator to our living camper.  Finally, we have power.  I immediately start unloading the van and putting all our cold stuff in the fridge and freezer.  It still feels pretty cold, so I don’t think we’ve lost any food. With that, our driver can finally make his trip back to Villahermosa after sitting and waiting for the camper and trailer to be ready. 

We also discover a slight hitch.  In a bizarre coincidence, this camper and trailer are the exact same ones that Paula and I were using at our last job.  We locked everything up and took the keys back to the office, but since they moved the trailer directly to us at this new rig, they don’t have the keys and we don’t either. They managed to break into both the camper and the trailer, but this means we can’t lock anything.  It makes us nervous, especially as we’ve already had a sensor cable go missing and we haven’t even been on the pad for 6 hours.

Tuesday

Tuesday I woke up early because a storm was coming through and a huge clap of thunder went off right over the staff house. It also rained so hard it created a 6 inch puddle that took up the entire parking lot. I got up and showered, ate breakfast (mmm leftover pasta from the night before, no ants) and took the car to the base. I breathalyzed into the base (Again, sober) and went into the office.

Once again, I ended up in the back room. I locked down my computer and went and said hi to some of my friends who came back from days off. Then I sat around for a while. I read a little, I paid bills, I talked to coworkers. When I’m at the base with no current job there’s not much for me to do. That’s not completely true, I do have some re-certifications to work on online and some new training to do, but I’ve been waiting for a nice quiet rig to work on them.

Finally, at around 2 we had stuff mostly ready to discuss my next job. They were still missing a lot of information from the client, which happens a lot, but we knew the basics.  We talked mostly about what frequency to program the tool with so that it could send me information up the hole and I would actually receive it.  Low frequencies travel further, but can get lost in the ‘noise’ the mud pumps create.  We finally came to a decision and got other critical information figured out. 

The next step is always to get PPE (personal protection equipment) from the base store. I also ordered new coveralls (yay!) and rain boots (which are two sizes too big, but better than wet feet).  We always get plenty of gloves, ear plugs, safety glasses, duct tape, electrical tape, and WD-40.  The necessities.

We packed up everything from the office and got in one of the vans we use for transport and stopped to pick up everyone’s stuff. That usually takes an hour or more. Then we shop for groceries.  Lately, all of my rigs have been ones where we cook for ourselves. I’ve gotten better at figuring out what meals are that people like to eat and what it’s possible to make on the rig. But it’s always nice when there’s someone around who actually enjoys cooking and does it well. One of our three person crew assures us he can cook rig-gourmet and so we leave the major shopping decisions up to him.

Monday

I’ve been wanting to try something a little different for a while now and I think I found a good chance to do that.  After being in Colorado for a while I’ve realized how hard it is to figure out what I actually do day-to-day. I’ve decided the only way to give a picture of that is to actually write about the day-to-day on a day-to-day basis. Of course I’m under no such delusion that I’ll actually be able to do that all the time, so we’re going to try it for a week.  Originally I wanted to start on Monday because I was in the base and figured I’d start a new job and you’d get to see all aspects of my job, at the base and in the field. Of course I was correct and thus it’s already Wednesday and I’m at the rig after being up all night and I have no internet to post. So I’m going to still start with Monday, but you probably won’t be reading this Monday. Or Tuesday. Or even Wednesday depending on when my internet gets here… So think back to Monday. Pretend its Monday.

Monday I woke up to someone slamming their door downstairs. I looked at my phone and realized I didn’t set an alarm and the car to the base was probably arriving in 5 mins.  I got ready super-fast and sure enough the car was there. They didn’t have to wait for me very long and we were on our way to the base. I breathalyzed into the base (I was sober, not a surprise at 9 am) and went into the office. 

We have a million trainees right now, and a lot of them are at the base getting ready for school or getting their training done so they can go to the rig. Because of this the engineer room was full and I went back to sit in the conference room at the back of the office with a few others. I arrived back from a job on Sunday, so in addition to my computer, I was also responsible for the two work computers we had with us on the job.  I locked up all three computers. I also introduced myself to two new trainees we (more Americans! I’m not alone anymore!) and checked in with another trainee about to take his pre-school test.