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
