Lately I've felt a little like a yo-yo. Or one who operates a yo-yo. A yo-yo-er? Now that I've confused myself I'll attempt to clarify. Lately I've been doing a lot of BHA lay down/pick ups back to back. What does that mean? Well...
The BHA is the bottom hole assembly. It's everything from the drill bit up, from my tools, until basically the start of normal drill pipe. I'll try to keep it simple here. Basically, every time something goes wrong way down at the bottom of the hole with the bit or the motor or one of my tools, in order to look at it or change it out we have to 'trip' out of the well back to surface. This means removing 30 m (90ft) lengths of drill pipe one at a time until we reach the part we need to change. This 'trip' can take anywhere from 3 hours to as long as 24 hours. So we don't like to do it very often.
 |
| Okay see the tubes on the right? Drill pipe. Waiting to go in the hole and make the BHA reach bottom. |
Once we get the BHA on surface, we usually change out everything. This is called picking up/laying down BHA depending on what you're doing. Every time the BHA comes to surface we have to take our tools out, 'dump' the data from the tool memory, then check functionality, make sure the tool will survive another 'run' into the hole and the drilling that goes with that, and then reprogram. Then we 'pick up' the tools again, test them again and trip back in the hole. All told, this process at it's most efficient takes about 8-10 hours. And it's completely exhausting.
Especially with the tools I'm running here.
