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
