The Job Where Everything Went Wrong

Turns out that in addition to being willing and able to work 12 hour shifts for weeks at a time without a day off, have the oddest sleeping schedule(s) or lack thereof, and understand Texan, this job also requires patience. Lots and lots and lots of patience.

There have been quite a few changes occurring in the wellsite department these last 2 months. The manager of wellsite operations left the company for another position and three of our lead geoscience hands left for other positions, two within the company and one for another company. After just under five months in this position I am now considered a lead hand. I am fairly certain this is due mostly to the fact that I am good at my job, and in small part to the fact that there are now 3 ½ of us that they feel confident sending on jobs with totally new people. The most exciting change that has occurred is that after several months of trying to get my dear friend and thesis research partner an interview with the company, the new manager of wellsite operations hired her over the phone on my recommendation. A compliment I am sure! She started work last week and I am so excited to have her here, as well as to have another girl in the department.

A few weeks ago I got sent back down to ….Texas, surprise, surprise! Since starting this job April 20 I have now spent 78 days in Texas. 78 days more than I ever anticipated spending here! This time I was sent down on my first job as lead hand, with a completely new guy. In the way that so many things come full circle we were sent back to Lantern Rig 12, the rig that I spent my first two Texas jobs on, my first two jobs period. If I never see another piece of the Eagleford Shale it will be far too soon!

The Eagleford is a hot oil and gas play in Texas right now. Google it if you are interested. One company man said that in a few years the entire formation will look like swiss cheese, holes poked into it everywhere. Drive east of San Antonio and/or south of Austin and it’s hard not to see a rig every few miles. Although, west Texas still takes the cake for pump jacks and rigs for miles. While driving to Ozona a few jobs ago my coworker and I gave up counting the rigs, they were so prolific that we couldn’t remember if we’d counted the ones we were passing when they were on the horizon. It seems that the Eagleford might already be getting a bit overplayed, or perhaps in this industry companies are always second guessing each other and trying to get the jump on one another. Anyway, the Eaglford is below the Austin Chalk in the stratigraphic column and the last two wells I have been on have been focusing on the bottom of the chalk and/or the top of the Eagleford. The “Chalkleford” as one roughneck put it. This means slower drilling. Ideally once the driller has “landed the curve” ie finished drilling the curve and “kicked off” ie started the lateral (horizontal) section of the well they will have the bit rotating and be drilling anywhere from 40-100ft an hour, the ROP (rate of penetration). But to stay on the dividing line between two formations requires them to drill quite a bit slower. This has meant that on the last two wells they alternate between sliding and rotating. Sliding means the bit is not rotating and they are basically forcing it through the rock, much slower than it would move were it rotating. In a way this is good for us, as it means a manageable amount of samples to clean and prep in a shift, but it also means that the well takes nearly double the amount of time to complete.

See how much I’m learning?!

Here is what I have learned pertaining directly to my job. The most important part of this job is being able to trouble shoot the SRA machine. This is a nightmare, especially since we are not really given any formal training on it; all troubleshooting skills are acquired in high stress situations. Something breaks and then you have to fix it. This is even harder because these machines are like the retarded child of R2D2 and Frankenstein; they contain (to name the most frequent problems) an FID, IR cells and an autosampler which loads crucibles. Also the software can at times (read: 98.7% of the time) feel like it was written by an overly ambitious 12 year old computer nerd with a crush on excel. It gets better. This was originally a lab machine and we put it into a pelican case, strap it down in our “mobile laboratory” (cargo trailer) and drive it all over God’s brown Texas. Once we reach our location, usually after driving down several miles of dirt roads followed by a rig road with at least 3 cattle guards made from old drilling pipe, we take the machine out of its case, hook it up to Helium, Hydrogen and CO2 free air, turn it on and hope it works. It usually doesn’t. Sometimes it can be something as simple as the FID response reading way too high, this is a relatively simple fix. Sometimes it is a voltage problem, a sometimes simple fix. Sometimes the FID won’t ignite, a gas flow problem usually the result of a leak. Sometimes it is the autosampler which simply won’t calibrate and load the crucible onto the pedestal. And sometimes nothing is going your way and you don’t even know where to begin. Such was this last job.

The new guy I was training is 47. He spent the last 7 years as the manager of a company which sold bathtubs. My old manager hired him right before he left. I’m on the fence about whether or not they should require people in the geosciences department to have technical degrees. On one hand most of what we do is fairly common sense. On the other hand there is definitely something to be said for having gotten a B.S., it changes your way of approaching and solving problems. Taking lab classes teaches you discipline and (can’t believe I’m beginning to think this is a good thing!) adherence to methodology. A passing interest in minerals and rock collecting in no way makes you a geologist! Well this new guy (referred to as NG from now on) thought he knew it all. He started off on the wrong foot by comparing me to his 21 year old daughter and as far as I’m concerned things continued to slide downhill from there. I had often worried that when it was time for me to train someone they wouldn’t respect me because I was a woman. This was made worse by NG because he is also 20 years older than me. It is hard to tell someone that much older than you what to do, especially when they already have a patronizing attitude. He simply didn’t listen to me. I remember when I had first started and I was working on this exact same rig. I cleaned samples like a madman because I knew that my coworker was setting up the complicated stuff and sending data reports twice a day. If I was told to do something I did it right away and generally worked my butt off. NG showed up over an hour late for his shift twice. We were living on site, literally 5 steps from our lab trailer. He didn’t do the simple things that I showed him, at times doubling the amount of work I had on an already overly stressful job. And he continued to patronize me all the while passively refusing to do the things that he needed to do. He complained about his sleep schedule when he was working days, a huge DON’T, in my opinion. And in general he just complained about things like missing his family, not having a routine like he used to; things that everyone deals with on their first job, but that most of us are smart enough not to vocalize. I digress. I believe you get the point.

This particular lab trailer had been outfitted with a generator on the tongue before I came down. Instead of buying a new generator we had been forced to retrofit a generator from an RV circa 1985. It was limping along when I got down there. Between jobs we took it into San Antonio to have it repaired. $1200 and an extra day later we were “good to go.” That extra day meant that we showed up on site late and were backlogged 50 samples. This is another OBM (oil based mud) job which means that cleaning samples takes about 20-30 minutes per sample. On this job we had two SRA machines and two XRDs, in theory this was to make our lives easier as we would be able to run twice the amount of samples in the same amount of time. Once we arrived on site we got all the equipment out and hooked up and then I told NG to start cleaning samples and I started trying to calibrate the SRA machines. From that moment on it seemed nothing would go right. One machine would work for a while, then the other one would do something crazy. Then I would get that one working and the other one would do something crazy. Our boss was online with me till about 1 am trying to help me figure it all out and by shift change the next morning neither machine was working. A few days later our boss flew down and spent 2 days repairing one machine and basically rebuilding the other one. When he left everything was running smoothly…for about 8 hrs. Small things started to go wrong, I was able to fix them. Then, on a night when I had just gotten everything up and running smoothly, the generator died precisely at midnight.

I’ll admit, I spent about five minutes swearing before trying to figure out what to do. We have battery backup in the trailer, but with two machines running I knew I had at best 6 hours at worst 2. I decided to play the girl card. I walked over to the company man’s trailer and told him my generator had died and asked if he had anyone who could look at it and maybe fix it. The first thing he asked was whether it had fuel. Guess that’s what I get for playing the girl card! Plus it took him three repeats before I understood what he was saying, the combination of a Texas and oilfield accent! The motorman came over, looked at it for a bit and then told me he thought it was probably dead, as it wouldn’t even turn over. Plan B. Call the boss. They tell me to rent a generator. It’s now about 1 am. I try several companies but none of them have small generators available, they have sent most of them to the east coast to help with hurricane Irene relief. I finally locate one but they won’t be able to get it to me until 8 am. I cross my fingers and hope that the batteries last. When the trailer is running on battery backup everything that is not absolutely essential to the machines running gets turned off, this means the AC is the first thing to get switched off. Even at night in Texas it is steamy and the trailer heated up quickly. I spent that long shift alternating between sweating it out for a while in the trailer and then feeling like I was freezing, sitting quietly in the dark in our living trailer. At about 5:30 a.m. the batteries began to give me the low battery warning. I quickly shut everything down and waited in the living trailer for the generator to get there. At 8:30 the generator arrived, we hooked it up and I went to bed.

The one other major inconvenience on this job was running out of standard. Standard is a little vial of crushed up rock. It has known values and we use it to calibrate the SRA machine. Every ten samples we run a crucible of standard through as a test. If the values come out within acceptable parameters the sequence keeps running, if they don’t we abort the rest of the sequence and then recalibrate. The night the generator died I had just used my last bit of standard calibrating both machines and loading the checks every ten samples in two 40 sample sequences. Having to power everything down when the batteries ran out meant that I would have to recalibrate, something I wouldn’t be able to do until more standard arrived. We received our standard at 6 p.m. that night. As I tried to recalibrate both machines neither one of them would work. Finally, at my wits end I turned one machine off and the other one magically started working. The next 48 hours everything ran smoothly. We had a break for about 36 hours as they had started losing circulation in the hole and weren’t really drilling, meaning we didn’t have any new samples to clean and run. They started drilling again as the sequence containing all our reruns and all the samples till that point was running. Finally! Something goes our way.

I got relieved on this job. I__ and I found a new house last time I was home and I had been given and promised a few days off at the beginning of the month to move. The guy who relieved me had only been on a few geoscience jobs and this was his first time ever being in charge. I was definitely nervous leaving him and NG together, but also nearing the end of my rope with this particular job. It seemed absolutely nothing had gone right. With only about 800 feet left to drill I crossed my fingers that the two of them would have smooth sailing and finish the job with no more major problems. As I sat in the airport waiting for my delayed flight I received a call from NG. It seemed that the one machine which had been running smoothly had been giving them error messages all night. I tried to troubleshoot over the phone, but I still don’t know if they ever got it running. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “so it goes.”

Peace out.

Pinky

Coffee and Cigarettes

Apparently I am not so great at being a blogger. I am constantly taking mental notes on the things that happen in my daily life and thinking "I could write a post about that" or "I should mention that in a post." But then I get 30 core chips and spend the rest of my shift giving myself a bruise on my hand grinding them up in the mortar and pestle. Or I get back to the hotel and find that all of the great ideas I had during the 45 minute drive have flown away at the site of my bed. More commonly, I sit down in the "lab" trailer to write something, and find myself with writers block. Perhaps it is caused by the nearly constant high pitched whine of the XRD, or the every 9 minutes, 6 second spurts of the air compressor turning on. It turns out the only thing I have actually written in the last month or so was a reading list for a co-worker, and even that was hard to force out.

Since my last post I have been on 2 more jobs and currently am living on site for the first time. In addition I have been home for 5 days in the last 3 months, none of them consecutively and was just in my closest college friends' wedding. This was considered my vacation, but if you've ever been in a big wedding you know that it is more stress than vacation!

I have continued to learn a ton. On my last 2 jobs before this one the client was taking core samples. This means that they were doing core runs. What this entails is drilling with a coring bit which takes core of, typically, about 3 inches in diameter. Usually core runs are done in sections of 90 feet. And in order to perform a core run the drilling bit is switched for the coring bit and the core hand takes over the driller's job for the duration of the core run. Once the run is completed the pipe is tripped out with the core and the core is then chopped into 3 foot sections. The core comes out of the ground in an aluminum tube and is capped on each end of the three foot sections with a rubber cap which is sealed using duct tape. For our analysis we take  chips off the end of the cores and grind them up to run through the machines. This is nice because instead of showing a range of 30 or 60 feet the way cuttings do, the chips pinpoint the values at an exact depth. It's not nice because they are a little harder to crush up and more tends to go wrong during a coring run than during normal drill ahead operations. On a job in Oklahoma this is exactly what happened. Everything was going smoothly, and very quickly until they got ready to start coring. Then, everything that could go wrong did. The hole started collapsing, then the began to lose circulation, so they changed the mud mixture and started adding diesel to it. Then during the first of 5 scheduled core runs of 90 feet they broke off after 7 feet. This well continued in much the same fashion. A lot of waiting, for very little. I read Anna Karenina in about 2 days.

Now, my first experience living on site. I have to say, I pretty much hate it. This well is also going very slowly, right now they are running intermediate casing, which means several days of sitting and waiting. To top it off, my coworker on this job is so awkward and boring and messy! He hasn't done a single dish since I've been here! (5 days and counting!) I may not do my dishes right away at home, but in a small trailer with a small shared space I do them immediately. This is the first time that I have actively disliked my coworker. Even on other jobs when they may have been someone I did not see eye to eye with politically or religiously, I have always found common ground and grown to genuinely like and enjoy each person I have previously worked with. Not so on this job! I realize now how important it is, especially when living with someone, to have someone you can talk with and enjoy passing time with.

So I have been passing the last few days writing, finally. Perhaps it is the ultimate boredom of being stuck out here in central Texas with no one to talk to. But the block is slowly melting away. Literally as it is 105+ everyday!

Peace out!

Pinky

Culture Shock 101: New Orleans: The Big Easy/The Dirty, Dirty

Friday afternoon, after asking our boss if we could do something fun over the long Memorial Day weekend we took off for New Orleans! My coworker grew up on the West Bank so we got to stay with his family and I got to experience the city with someone who knows it! I honestly never thought that I would ever go to New Orleans, as I told people all weekend it is the farthest south I have ever been. I’ve driven around the western half of the country quite a bit. Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, California and South Dakota are places I’ve passed through, if not the destination themselves, at some time in the past 6 years of my life. What I noticed on all of those journeys is that some states blend into each other and if not for the Welcome sign you would not know that you had entered another state. (Western Montana and Eastern Idaho on I-90) Some state borders appear to be arbitrary lines drawn on a map by politicians. (Eastern Wyoming and Western South Dakota) Some borders are defined by topography or large geographical features. (Southern Washington and Northern Oregon are split by the majestic Columbia River) As we drove east from Houston on I-10 I wondered what the border between Louisiana and Texas would be like. I’d heard that Louisiana was often referred to as the swamplands, and I had not seen any evidence of swamplands in Texas. Sure enough, the border between these two states is in an actual swamp, and the change in climate and scenery only gets more defined from there.

Long stretches of I-10 are actually a suspended highway over swampy areas. And this spring the swamps are more like lakes due to the flooding of the Mississippi and the spillways which have been opened. For a fun and informative look at the spillway situation check out: http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/05/08/michael-bays-scenario/. We crossed the Atchafalaya River and saw it surging near the top of the levees and surrounded by a lake with trees partially submerged, according to the GPS we were driving over dry ground, according to our eyes it was a definite lake! Outside of New Orleans, is the Bonnet Carre Spillway. When opened this spillway lets floodwaters into Lake Pontchartrain. We drove over this spillway and the gates were wide open. Water was surging into Lake Pontchartrain! You could whitewater raft on it, literally. It was quite the site to see the muddy floodwaters gushing into the blue waters of the lake. An historic site that I got to witness!

Once we arrived in New Orleans on Friday night we attended Greek Fest followed by a trip to a local gay bar to meet some of my coworker’s friends. My drink (whiskey ginger ale) was all whiskey with a dash of ginger. After buying 2 of them my tab was only 7 dollars and I was drunk. I went outside to answer I__’s phone call and naturally left my drink inside. When I came back in everyone laughed and told me I should have taken my drink with me, because, news to me, it’s ok to just drink all the time anytime, anywhere in New Orleans. In Washington and Colorado where I’ve done most of my bar drinking it is absolutely not ok to bring your drink outside unless there is a designated, fenced patio. And it is also not ok to smoke inside. In New Orleans neither of these applies. Culture shock. We crossed the Mississippi that night on the Crescent Connection Bridge over to the West Bank, which is really the East side of the River from downtown. Culture shock (and confusion).

Saturday we went to a Crawfish boil at a friend of my coworker’s father’s house. This was so much better than the festival we went to in Texas, much more intimate and you served yourself as much crawfish as you could eat with all the potatoes, corn, mushrooms, onions and garlic you wanted. You grab a big tray and a scoop and fill up your tray with deliciousness and then start tearing the heads off the crawfish. So spicy and delicious! My coworker ate 3 trays in the time it took me to finish one, what can I say, I’m still learning! Culture shock.

Driving back to the West bank we passed houses that had been destroyed by Katrina. Some of them have large X’s spray painted on the sides, apparently this means that there were dead bodies inside those houses. It is clear that some areas have been rebuilt, while others seem to have just been abandoned. My coworker and his sister explain what housing projects used to be where newly constructed apartments and houses stand. Some houses have recently been raised and in a few places if you look really closely you can still see waterlines. In some neighborhoods the water was 10-14 feet high, in others it barely flooded at all. It was mind boggling to realize how damaged the city was by Katrina, especially being a “northerner”, it was impossible for me to imagine what was happening when hearing about it on the news, and even after seeing the destruction 5 years later, it is still nearly impossible to imagine. Culture shock, in so many ways.

From the West Bank we took the free ferry across the River to the French Quarter. We wandered through the French Market and various streets. It is so humid in New Orleans! I felt as though I was breathing underwater and even my lightweight sundress stuck to me. Definitely the most humid place I had ever been! After dinner at Port of Call, a burger place where instead of fries you get a baked potato with your fresh delicious burger, we wandered down Bourbon Street. Bourbon St has to be seen to be believed. The street is blocked off so no cars drive down it at night and people wander in and out of neon signed bars, drinks in hand. As the night progresses the wander transitions to stumbling for some. We meet up with some more of my coworker’s friends and head to a dance club, Mimi’s. The beer is good and the dj plays groovy funk. Upstairs everyone is dancing and sweating. If you want to dance you must switch to water, it is simply too hot to imagine drinking anything else. People in the south get down! No one cares about what their neighbor is doing, they are there to get their groove on and it is refreshing and invigorating to be dancing in this environment. I could have stayed all night. It was already 4 am. We ended the night with “breakfast” at an Italian café that was still open. I think that while in Colorado last call is often at 1:35 even though closing is at 2, in New Orleans there is no last call. Beautiful culture shock.

Monday we went to a Hash BBQ. From what I understand these are running clubs and they are all over the country/world. But in New Orleans they are also drinking clubs. Everyone arrives midafternoon and drinks beer from two kegs set up in City Park and eats food grilled there on grills people have brought with them. The park is beautiful, huge Live Oaks with their arms draped in moss stretch over walkways and shade us from the burning sun. At about 6 when everyone is good and buzzed the running part starts. You follow a trail created by one of the members made out of circles of flour. I did the walking version since I was wearing sandals. After the run, every one forms a circle and sings raunchy songs and drinks beer. Groups are called into the center of the circle; I was called in with the “Virgins” since this was my first hash. Others were called in for being absent for a long time, for talking, for being visitors, for…you name it. Now my home hash will always be New Orleans. I can’t wait to find a hash club in Colorado and enter the circle as a visitor! Culture shock.

Now I’m back here in Nixon, TX. Back on night shift. Back to analyzing the Eagle Ford Shale. The moon is a sliver and the sky is still just a little orange on the horizon. I realized the other day that this is the longest I have ever inhabited a place where there were not mountains on one horizon or the other. It’s starting to feel a little strange. I’m soaking up the south. The dirty, dirty south, the vibrant, sticky south. Often these days as I traipse from strange place to unexpected beauty and dancing I’m reminded of my conversation at Vantage, WA with Harry. I still stand by the conclusion we reached that night in 2006. I love America because nowhere else can you experience, with ease, the diversity of people and place and love that I continually find in this country. I’ll probably end up saying “y’all” instead of “you guys” one of these days. Yeehaw!

Peace out!

Pinky

 Crawfish Boil!

 Mighty Mississippi, only about 1 foot from the top of the Levees! Those trees are normally on dry land!

 On the ferry leaving the West Bank with downtown New Orleans in the background!

Bourbon Street!

Houston: The hot, sticky, yucky

This blog was not intended to be so sporadic, but I will address the reason for this overdue post later.

We finished running (analyzing) samples on my third job about 2 weeks ago. After working a full 12 hour shift babysitting the retarded robot with cat naps in between samples, we packed up the instruments, emptied the buckets and prepared the trailer to move to Houston for a few days. We have a lab in Houston and needed a secure place to park the trailer and a shop with tools we could use to perform a few modifications. The most exciting new feature, a second rooftop air conditioner!! It is so hot down here that often around 5 o’clock each afternoon the machines get extra finicky because of the heat. With our 2 AC’s we hope to remain cool as cucumbers.  This post is mainly about my experiences the past 10 days in Houston/New Orleans. The New Orleans days will be added in tomorrows post.

Houston is a disgusting, overly freewayed example of urban sprawl and the boom and bust of the oilfield culture that permeates Texas.  I could never get offered enough money or career advancement to EVER live there. Good to know I suppose.  We arrived there on a Thursday afternoon, talked shop with some folks at the lab and then I ate and went to sleep. I don’t mind working nights at all, but the transition between sleeping during the day or during the night is always rough. After working on the trailer all day Friday we spend Saturday at a crawfish boil in Spring. I had never eaten crawfish before this, which shocked many of my companions. They are delicious! A crawfish boil is performed by dumping a bunch of crawfish, potatoes, corn, garlic, mushrooms, onions and sausage with Cajun spices into a giant vat of boiling water. The crawfish are alive (just like lobsters) and they turn red when they are done. To eat them you pull off the head and eat the tail. Some folks “suck the head” to get out the juices found there. I did once, just to say I did, but overall I found the eating to be much more my style than the sucking.  Sunday was spent relaxing and Monday was spent doing more trailer work and talking to the IT department to get my computer working. Success!

Monday afternoon/evening we went to meet my coworker’s college friend for dinner and beer at a pub located in a shopping center near the lab. While eating our truck was broken into and robbed. They took everything of my coworker’s except his work laptop, and everything of mine except my clothes. For him this included: personal computer, mp3 players, camera, headlamp, and many other pieces of gear and clothing. For me it included: my iPod, camera, headlamp, phone charger, glasses, library books and, most importantly, MY JOURNAL. I would gladly give the thieves my electronics if they would only return my journal. We called the police who arrived promptly, only to inform us that this happens often in the area we were in and that we would probably never see our possessions again. We tried the next day to search dumpsters in the area, hoping they would have thrown away items that could not be pawned. No luck, we weren’t able to locate any outside trash cans at all! A moment here to lament the loss of my journal: It was journal number 5. I started journaling freshman year of high school and since then I have filled 4 and ½ college ruled notebooks, front and back, with my thoughts, poems and big life events. The one that was stolen covered the time period from just after college graduation till now, about 2 years exactly. It contained my falling in love with I__ and my “breakup” with H____. It had poems and letters from various people tucked into its back pages that I will never get again. It had my still in progress list of 100 books I feel everyone should read which I was in the process of annotating. Losing it was like losing a friend. So it goes. 

Getting robbed sucks. The worst part about it is knowing that the things you value the most are the things that a thief will just throw away, a good back pack, library books, a journal, headlamps, glasses. I guess I learned to always take the irreplaceable things inside with me all the time. That is the reason I haven’t updated this sooner. There have been tons of experiences, but no computer to blog with. Now that I’m back on site and back in the trailer I will start updating more regularly. Tomorrow or a few days from then: New Orleans. 

Life in the Oilfield

It’s 2 am, day 10, third well, Texas. There is so much to say, I’ve been thinking about this post for weeks now, and especially the last few nights (which are my days, these days, or is it nights?)


So what to call this post? How about “Life in the Oilfield” but that’s not quite right because they aren’t drilling for oil here, but rather, for natural gas. What about “The Irony of Energy Usage and Extraction in America?” Or “The Catch-22 of Living in the 21st Century?” Really, it is all of the above.

Life in the Oilfield

I had no idea what to expect going onto my first site. All I could think as I drove through groves (fields?) of Live Oaks was “what did I get myself into?!” When I saw the rig I was shocked by its sheer size, and when I got out of the truck I was assaulted by the noise of it all. 130 feet tall, at least, and surrounded by generators and tanks holding various fluids. The drilling platform is raised about 30 feet off the ground, there is a shipping container sized office on this platform where the computers and some of the necessary equipment are stored. Outside of this on the platform is the actual hole with steel piping spinning as it goes deep underground. Rising 90 feet above this are the derricks, 2 30 foot sections that create a metal cage around the pipe. The smell of oil and machinery is overbearing and disgusting. Men wearing coveralls permanently stained various shades of brown and black move around pulling heavy pieces of machinery into place. Perhaps I have never felt more out of place. OSHE regulations for oil and gas sites require short service employees (anyone who has been working their job for less than 6 months) to wear a bright orange hard hat. The purpose for this is so that seasoned workers can spot an inexperienced hand and keep an eye on them, it is designed to increase the safety of everyone working on that particular rig. Of course it draws attention to you. Add boobs into the equation, and well, you get the picture. My coworker points out the BOP (blow out preventer), yup, that same thing we’ve all been hearing about for over a year because it failed on the Deep Water Horizon; it’s huge! A ball of metal and huge arms designed to clamp down and shut a well. It’s frightening to look at and mind boggling to think about it working, or failing to work. Behind the BOP are the mud pits. We walk over them and here the stench is the most repulsive. Drilling mud is used to lubricate the drilling bit and it is circulated back up the pipe and sometimes reused, the pits hold both used and unused drilling mud. The mud can be oil or water based, down here on this particular formation they always use oil based mud (OBM).

I quickly learned that OBM sucks. Mud loggers “catch” samples as the mud is recirculated to the surface and gets sent over the shakers before being returned to the pits. The bit breaks off tiny pieces of rock called (appropriately) cuttings. These cuttings are brought to the surface with the mud. The mud loggers then give us samples of these small rock bits so that our quantitative data can later be correlated with their qualitative data. OBM sucks because it requires half an hour, minimum, per sample to clean the mud off. We have to remove all the drilling mud because we are testing the samples for hydrocarbon content and any residual OBM will skew the results. This cleaning process involves simple green, water and a lovely substance called dichloromethane. Google it.

In our mobile lab trailer I operate two different machines, the XRD (X-Ray diffractor) and the SRA (Source rock analyzer). The XRD gives us a mineralogical profile of the sample and the SRA is used for reservoir completion. Both machines require crushed rock and we have a little ball crusher that does this. The mobile lab is really quite sweet. There is a hood for cleaning samples with DCM, which if you googled like I suggested you’ll know why we want/need a hood for that stuff. The SRA machine is something that only my company does, so I can’t say much more about it because I’m pretty sure it is considered a trade secret. But I can say that it is finicky and I like to refer to it (at a friend’s suggestion) as a retarded robot. The XRD machine looks like a suitcase, a small one that you could carry on to a plane. In college we had an XRD in the geology department and had to use it for at least one experiment in mineralogy. The thing was huge! It took an entire table to sit on and was at least a few feet tall. I am constantly amazed at the technology that goes into resource retrieval; the lab side is just one facet of that complex and ever evolving technology.

As suspected, I am the only woman on this site. And while no one has said anything to my face, they definitely stare at me in the daily safety meetings that this particular company man requires everyone on site to attend. And the port-a-potty is disgusting. Really, really disgusting. I pee outside. Also, a fair amount of the roughnecks (rig workers) are convicts of some kind!

The Irony of Energy Usage and Extraction in America

One HUGE irony I have noticed: everything here is run by generators, which run on diesel fuel. We burn fuel to get fuel. I used to think that somehow we humans would manage to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. That is not going to happen until all the fossil fuels are gone. This well will be hydraulically fractured to produce gas from shale, an unconventional reservoir rock. You’ve probably heard about fracking on the news. It is the practice of injecting brine into the rock at such high pressure that it causes the rock to fracture, the gas then moves along these fracture lines. People are now saying that this practice causes groundwater contamination. I’ve read papers and rants on both sides of the issue. I think it’s too soon to know, which is unacceptable. Fracking is completely unregulated and in big oil and gas states like Texas I don’t see that changing anytime soon. I think the best solution is to require companies to study the formations between the layer they are fracking in and where the aquifer lies. Until that happens, its drill baby drill. Here is an interesting article from National Geographic discussing fracking and a study done at Duke University: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/natural-gas-drilling-linked-to-methane-in-water/

The Catch-22 of Living in the 21st Century

If you are interested in reading more about our endless quest for fossil fuels Kenneth Deffeyes 2006 book Beyond Oil is a fascinating quick read. In it he basically supports my conclusion (perhaps it was his conclusion first) that we won’t stop consuming fossil fuels until they are gone, or until the extraction process becomes so costly it is no longer affordable. Deffeyes is referring primarily to oil, but one of the reasons I loved his book was because he laid out a realistic progression of energy sources. Once oil gets too scarce/expensive we will need an intermediate fuel; natural gas, followed and supplemented by nuclear and then finally, hopefully one day switching to sustainable, renewable energy like wind, solar, geothermal and tidal. Just five years after the publication of Beyond Oil I feel like we are already entering the natural gas phase. Unfortunately the Fukushima disaster in Japan has focused negative energy on the nuclear industry. It is my opinion that needing nuclear energy in the near future is an unavoidable consequence of the inefficiency of government and the unwillingness of oil and gas companies to support alternative energies. Or something to that effect. What we need to realize about Fukushima is that it was an old plant, and it had not been upgraded as newer technologies became available. The 104 nuclear reactors in the U.S are in similar, and sometimes worse, states. Before building new plants we need to focus on regulating and upgrading the existing plants. New plants are inevitable but we need to make sure it’s done right. There is a great article in Rolling Stone by Jeff Goodell discussing the nuclear regulatory agency in the U.S, or should I say lack thereof? Check it out!
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/america-s-nuclear-nightmare-20110427

Peace out!

Pinky

Paradox and Bedrock

I got it! Starting in just 9 days I will begin my new job as a Well site Geoscientist! This will entail a ton of travel, up to 230 days a year away from home! I will be going to well sites all over the country and possibly the world working 12 hour shifts analyzing rock core from deep below the surface to determine whether or not oil and gas companies can make money off of it. As one coworker told me “I will be visiting all the assholes of America.” I can hardly wait. Another coworker told me the female to male ration is 1:30. Love it. Love doing things that women have not typically done, love hanging out with “dudes.” I am so excited! I can’t wait for this new challenge, to learn how to handle myself on a drill rig, to tough it out in crazy conditions and bizarre locations, to learn an entirely new set of skills in an industry I never imagined breaking into. I’m nervous about being on a rig, what if I accidently chop off a finger or slip off some stairs? Time to be alert and cautious! I’m nervous about my relationship with I__; will this make us stronger or tear us apart? Only time can tell. In a way I’m sad about leaving (sort of) my live in Boulder. It’s taken 8 months and an unusually snow free and depressing winter for me to finally feel like I have friends here. Funny how finding your niche takes so much time and emotional energy. It is likely while I am away for weeks at a time some of my new found friends will have moved on; a necessary side effect of living in a place like Boulder where so many of the young people are transient and just passing through or waiting for summer. I guess that is the beauty of the internet, it is becoming easier and easier to stay in touch with all the wonderful people I cherish, though they are scattered all over the country.

A few words regarding small towns (aka the assholes of America): Last Friday I went to the Ponderosa Inn, the only bar in the small, stoplight free, town I grew up in. It was karaoke night and I met my parents there for some Jim Beam well whiskey and a night of surprises and reflectance. For a small town with a single bar I expected the karaoke to be mildly painful, if not awful. What a pleasant surprise! Not only could nearly every singer hold a tune, the local folks were pretty good dancers as well! Looking around with whiskey warm in my stomach it dawned on me that this is the type of bar I can expect to be frequenting more and more in the upcoming years as I travel around the country. It also reminded me of the night in Tensleep, WY when our field camp of 20 students drank and played pool with the locals. The locals consisted of a few “roughnecks” from an oil field just outside of town, the owners of the Crazy Woman Cafe, and a man working on a dinosaur dig 20 miles outside of town. It was perhaps one of the best experiences of field camp, which was chalk full of crazy stories. I’ve realized that I love small towns. After several years of attempting to run away from this fact, Friday night was the perfect time to realize its truth. I have my dad’s knack for chatting with anyone and everyone, somehow always finding common ground, and as I’ve grown up I’ve learned how to avoid touchy subjects and still be charming. I can’t wait to frequent more small towns with more great bars. Some people experience America on bike, by hiking it, by hitching it. I plan to experience America by quite literally, touching the bedrock; by drinking with farmers who won’t ever give up on their patch of semi-arid soil, by visiting the one bar in the one town for 50 miles, and by embracing the paradox of life in this wonderful country. As Edward Abbey put it, “Paradox and Bedrock.”

Peace out!

Pinky

Coming up next: A Five Part Post about REE and hybrids

Cohabitating With a Lover

A lovely friend, who was disgruntled and lost in her 30 year marriage, warned me of cohabitation. She advised me to set up rules early, “don’t start doing his laundry for him, he’ll never do it himself.” “Decide who does what in the kitchen, and stick to it.” Etc, etc. I listened to her advice, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that I heeded it. J

I__ and I began our cohabitating experiment (my term, not his) in August of 2010. I knew (or thought I knew) that we were both messy people. What I quickly learned in the first month was that while I am messy, in the manner of always having clothes on the floor, never putting books away and hating to make the bed; I__ is messy in more of a slob way, leaving dishes for days in the sink, even when the sink is overflowing with dishes, keeping even clean clothes on the floor, and not knowing how to clean.

Example: cleaning the kitchen for him means wiping off the visible counter space, spraying out the sink, giving the stove top a quick wipe. Sweeping or mopping the floor? Not with I__.  Whereas I use comet, scrub the stove and always sweep and usually at least consider mopping or spot checking the floor.

Example: We both love cooking. I__ is an artist and I am a scientist, this distinction isn’t always apparent in our lives, but in the kitchen it really becomes obvious. For I__ cooking is a creative process, he is in the kitchen making a huge mess, happily “creating.” For me it is more of an experiment. I am in the kitchen analyzing and wearing lab goggles to chop onions. The end results with both of us are always delicious; the state of the kitchen is less delicious when I__ has finished creating than when I have finished experimenting.  When I__ does dishes he does them until the drying rack is full. When I do dishes I collect every dish I can find and wash them all, stopping to dry as the rack becomes full.

I’ve heard people hypothesize that women are instinctively more passive aggressive than men, and after 8 months of living together I find myself starting to believe that. I find myself thinking, if I__ hasn’t done x yet, then I’m certainly not going to do it, or pointedly doing y without explaining my attitude about it. This has gotten me nowhere. Men are dense, especially my love, so cohabitation is an exercise in clear, direct communication, something we are slowly developing.

One day, the honeymoon phase definitively ended. For the first time in our year+ relationship I thought about just walking away from the whole thing.

Perhaps it was inevitable to reach the point where I say, in a very angry voice, “I love you but I HATE living with you!” The trouble with loving the one you live with is that you have to sleep next to them at night even when you can’t get them to stop snoring, no matter how many times you kick them. You have to cook dinner together, even when one of you wants salad and the other prefers steak. You have to tolerate and interact with their friends, even when you would likely never become friends with those people on your own.

Perhaps it was just as inevitable that on the day I tried to break up with I__ and run away, he called me on my bullshit. This thing about living with the one you love, you forget that they will always have the ability to surprise you with insights about yourself that you would never achieve without them.

All in all I think the experiment is turning out to be a success. I__ is learning to communicate; I am learning to express myself without the passive aggressive part. We are actually learning to argue. This is huge. We are two very headstrong people, who are often extremely stubbornly convinced that “I’m right.” Learning to argue has meant that both of us at times have to say, “You’re right.” Surprisingly I__ is much better at this statement than I.

There will always be things about the person you live with and love that bug you. The key is to make sure those are things you can live with. It is impossible to change another person to match your fairytale ideal, but it is infinitely more rewarding to learn to live with and love a real human, in all their messy, slobby glory.

Peace Out.

Pinky

"A Foot in the Door" or "Could the World Really be MY Oyster?"

An excerpt from an email sent to a very good friend.

"I am considering disregarding your well intended advice about being happy with my cubicle job. We had an open house yesterday with about 200 clients in attendance. I got to talking with the recruiting director from our corporate office about how I ended up in the Project Coordinator position. I told him that I had originally applied for a Field Tech position but ended up not being able to interview for it.

[Tangent: I’ve thought about this whole field work thing a lot. And being in the field is what made me fall in love with geology in the first place, well that and the cute menJ All joking aside though, I kind of love being in a male dominated (not for much longer) industry. The feminist in me loves doing, or attempting to do, things that women would not typically be considered for. ]

So I’m talking with this man about how despite what all of the guys have told me, I really do have a hankering for field work. I say something along the lines of “I know I can do well in an office culture, I’m charming and smart at the politics game, but I don’t want to end up stuck in the cubicle lifestyle and never get a chance to be on site and getting my hands dirty. Having an office job will be great when I’m 27-30, but I feel like now is the ideal time to have a field job.” He asked if I have a geology degree. Told me he is hiring geologists left and right and would prefer to recruit internally. Gives me his business card. Talks about how I could be making $70,000/yr. The conversation moves on, and a few minutes later he turns to me and says “I can see the wheels turning, I’m serious, give me a call, send me your resume.”

Here’s the thing man. I think I want it. I want to know if I really can hack it doing shitty, dirty, hot/cold work. I want to see if I can hack it being (likely) the only woman on site. Getting a geology degree was a big challenge, and I want another challenge. Part of what depresses me about my loans is that I feel like they can pigeonhole me into becoming obsessed with security…that’s not quite right…obsessed with playing it safe maybe, sticking with something that I like, even when there may be something I will like more out there.

A brief comment on I__: The thing about I__ and his interactions with women and me, is that they aren’t like any other man that I’ve ever known. I really believe that even if I was gone for 230 days out of the year for a year or two that it might make our relationship better. And after that time, I would be debt free and we would finally be on more equal financial footing. "

Maybe its true that when it rains it pours, or perhaps it is more true that we make our own luck. Either way, I'v always liked jumping off of cliffs...

Peace out.
Pinky

THE Job Search

When I got to college I was convinced that I hated math and science and loved philosophy and politics. Halfway through school, I felt smug looking at statistics showing entry level geologists making $75,000 right out of school. Then, luckily for B__, just in time for him to write about in his senior thesis, the economy went to hell and everyone but the bankers were shocked. Resource prices plummeted, then became inconsistent, the construction industry followed the housing market down the toilet, and professional geologists with masters degrees found it hard to find a decent, steady job. And I had $50,000+ in student loans. You know, the "good" kind of debt. (grimace)

Yikes. I still thought that I was sitting pretty. I had published my thesis abstract, as well as conducted research and written the thesis itself. I had worked for Colorado's Division of Mining, Reclamation and Safety for several summers while in high school. Surely I wouldn't look like every other resume employers received from freshly degreed children. And luckily I didn't. I got an internship, through the connection of my dad, working for an international aggregate and concrete company...in Colorado. And although I didn't ever plan on living in Colorado ever again,. I moved home. Literally, moved back into my old room and commuted 2 hours a day to a job that I never really liked. Its nice to be able to admit that now. I had an amazing boss though, and that made it worthwhile.

Again, I thought I had it made. The fear of not being able to make my student loan payments made me think that if I just made a good enough impression during my internship, that probably, I would get a job offer at the end. And while surface sand and gravel mining and production didn't make me wild, having a steady job did. My paranoia and boredom worked to fuel my search for a job that I actually liked, using my degree. I spent 30 minutes to 3 hours each day looking at postings and writing cover letters for jobs all over the country, for local governments, the government, mining companies, consulting companies, environmental agencies...About six months into this process I created form letters which I modified as needed for various positions. I created a cut and paste work history form for ease in filling out online applications. I became more disgruntled with every "amazing" position I never even got a form rejection for. My internship ended without a job offer, and without the possibility of collecting unemployment.

For the last 2-3 months of my internship I had begun applying for "shit jobs." My term for jobs which were boring and low paying. I applied to nanny, to work in a call center (managed one for 2 years in college), to hostess and waitress, to barista, with temp agencies, chains, non-profits. At best I got an interview where they told me I was overqualified, or that I didn't have enough barista experience, etc. I just kept thinking after each rejection, but I'm here, on time, nicely dressed, making eye contact telling you that I want the job and can perform it well, and I can't even get a job at Starbucks? Sheesh.

A month of earnest job searching, after my internship ended, and I landed a job working as a house cleaner for Boulder's affluent. I was relieved to have a job, even if it was hourly, at minimum wage. The real kicker, I had to tell them I was going to go back to school and just wanted to take a year off to convince them to hire me.

I am generally a happy person. But my employment situation bummed me out so much that it began to affect the way I viewed the world. "Employment Depression." To be certain of your ability to perform, and to not be given a chance to show or prove that is the strangest experience. To have paid so much money to learn and learn to love what you do, and then not be able to do it, it will mess with a person.

When I was at rock bottom, ready to leave the man I love and run away to a different state. I got a job offer. In my field. And just like that my faith in the universe began to recover. Two weeks in and I love waking up every morning to go to an office/lab where I am surrounded by fellow geologists. Where I fit right in, without even trying. Since accepting this job I have received calls about two other positions, in my field. Maybe the talking heads are right and the economy is improving.

I feel like this long self therapy session should conclude with some kind of lesson. Sorry folks I don't have one. Maybe the lesson is to not give up? Or perhaps the message is that there should never be one part of your life that is so consuming it controls your happiness completely.

I'll update this more frequently, and I promise future posts will not be so long or self involved, well, at least not as long.

Upcoming topics include:

Entering the Mid 20's: Its all good now

6 Months in Boulder

Cohabitating...w/a lover

Peace out.

Pinky