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.

Standing on the floor we encounter more problems.  While trying to use the iron roughneck to torque our tools together, it breaks and gets stuck on the tools.  They spend about 30 mins trying to release the tools. Our tools use extenders to talk to each other. In this case we’re using two tools so it’s only one connection, but that connection is very important.  We had just spent about 45 mins cleaning the connections and making sure the tool would connect without mud getting inside and preventing communication. All that work is now for nothing. They manage to get the iron roughneck off the tools and separate them again. Both end of the connection are now completely full of mud.  We spend another hour or so cleaning them out.

Finally the tools are all together.  It took about 4 hours to get to this point. The rig crew connects the other two parts that go below our tools and then attach the bit. While they do this, I go ask the rig manager if I can have an extension cord to plug in our computer and equipment for our tool test.  It takes a little work, he’s from Venezuela so his Spanish is a little different than what I’m used to.  Eventually we figure it out though and he promises to have the rig electrician get something for us.

Almost 7 hours after we start putting the tools together, we’re ready to test them in the well. This involves pumping mud through them to make sure the tool turns on when it feels the flow and that the sensors can read the information the tool is sending. We start flowing… and our signal is bad. We check everything. Eventually, because we have erratic voltage readings in our sensor values, we conclude that we’re having problems because our power supply isn’t providing constant current. We give the go ahead to continue to the bottom of the well. Little did we know at the time, this issue would continue to plague us.

At this point we have the chance to sleep and eat and shower. It’s about 10am and the trip to get the bit to the bottom will take 4-6 hours we predict.  We know that we’ll have to stop and do a calibration on our sensor and we want to test the tool again with our generator running, but we should have a few hours before we have to do that.

The rest of the day is spent sleeping, eating, doing paperwork and waiting.  I spend most of the afternoon getting all our software ready to receive data. We finally get our satellite dish set up so we have internet and phone.  No sooner than 20 minutes after our internet starts working, it starts raining so hard the internet goes out again. The pad floods which gives me a chance to use my new rain boots. I check in with the rig every once in a while. We’re expecting to calibrate our sensor at around 9pm, but once again the rig is having problems. It’s lucky for me; I’m getting tired again after being up most of the afternoon and not sleeping well in the morning. I go to sleep telling Paula to wake me for the calibration. I expect to be woken up in an hour or two.