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.