Back to work in the oil field again!

Another interesting day! Today I was on the "Super Vac Truck". Its basically a semi sized shop Vac on wheels! This thing can suck up anything that can fit up its 6 inch hose including the gloves right off your hands. The first load was 'invert mud' which is a heavy mixture of diesel fuel and some sort of clay mud (and a glove).
Its very heavy and apparently very expensive to make at around $150 a barrel. It looks like chocolate syrup and has the consistency of cold gear oil but smells like paint thiner. We dumped this in a large bin at a new well that is being drilled.

Our second job for the day was an accidental invert mud spill that some other company made. They where filling a tank with new invert mud and the truck driver apparently never bothered to walk around to the back of the tank to see if all the valves where closed. One truck load later there was a puddle the size of a basket ball court three inches deep behind the tanks.
The driver was fired on the spot as I was told.

I spent the rest of my day in 'Willie Wonkas chocolate river' pushing invert mud around with a giant squeegee. We salvaged around 55 barrels of a estimated 60 barrel spill. I got a free lunch and my company has likely picked up a new trucking contract!

If you ever make a really big mess the Super Vac truck rents out for $175 an hour and I get 21% of that on top of a $10 an hour base pay unless its overtime like today.
If your wondering, that works out to about $70.13 an hour.
So go ahead and pee or do whatever else you want to in the pool, I will happily clean up after you because I like my job!

The first picture is the Super Vac Truck.
The second and third pictures are the truck being dumped into the bin at the new well.
The fourth picture is the $9000 spill we cleaned up and salvaged for the other company.
The fifth picture is a new pit at the new well. Its about 50 feet wide 200 feet long and 12 feet deep. I may get to pump that out in a few weeks.
The sixth picture is the borings coming from the well as its being drilled. Today they were doing "Fast drilling" which produces a five gallon pail of borings about every 2 seconds.

This really gets interesting. I'll tell you right now I would love to be the guy selling all of you visqueen as there seems to be no shortage of the stuff used.

Thanks for sharing some really great pictures and an insight of what the hell is going on.

Ron

It's great to see such an enthusiastic approach to the job as a whole and not just a 'turn up and get the paycheck' attitude.

Thanks for the pics and the write-ups, I'm sure you're having a fine time 'soaking it all up', if you'll pardon the pun. ;-)

Keep 'em coming.

tcm, you should hit up the Dirty Jobs crew, I haven't seen all the episodes but I don't' think they've done anything like that before, at least not on that scale.

Unfortunately no pictures this week. I dropped my camera and the battery holder broke early on and I did not have a chance to fix it until today. I have been trained on about every major thing that the water related people do now as well.

Word got out to the boss that I am an industrial maintenance tech with electrical and electronics skills so I am being sent to the shop next week to free up more truck space for the newest batch of trainee's. I dont mind really. No more getting up at 4 AM every day and getting home ate 8 PM.

Now I will be chasing electrical bugs on trucks and other stuff.

I got a few odd pictures sent to me now from one of the guys I worked with this week. We where delivering fresh water to the day tank on a rig. I did learn a few things more about what they do though.Hopefully most of this is correct or close to being correct.

The wells here are 16 inches in diameter for the initial bore hole and run out about 20,000 to 21,000 feet from the surface to the end point. The bend is started at around 8000 - 9000 feet and makes a radius bend of about 1000 feet. They use a special drill head that is able to be steered as it drills to do this. The drill head can be about 20 -30 feet long depending on the design. However there are apparently a number of different ways they can do the bends also.

When a well is first drilled a pre drilling rig does a 16 inch bore hole to around 3000 - 4000 feet and that typically has the permanent 16 inch casing grouted and set in permanently before the actual main drilling rig goes to work a few weeks later. Once the main rig has done the bore to around the 21,000 foot point a smaller diameter casing of 4 - 5 inches is put in that carries the actual oil that comes out of the ground. They install that to go down from the bottom of the 16 inch casing all the way out the end of the bore. Around here the wells can produce up to 1600 PSI at the surface in some instances.

The rig I was at had a line burst while drilling causing a blowout condition. Until the blowout preventer valves and other stuff does its job oil, drilling mud, and whatever else is in the bore hole can gush out at 100's of gallons a second! That makes a big mess real fast!

Also the rigs are designed as modular units so that all parts are less than 12 feet wide and under 100 feet long with a disassembled weight under 60,000 pounds. Everything just bolts, pins, or clamps together. Also all hoses and power cords have threaded twist lock or cam lock connectors on them and are labeled as to where each connection a piece of equipment goes.


The first picture is me looking up at the top of the drilling rig tower while standing on pallets behind the truck I was unloading. The blowout made a huge mess where we had to unload.
The second picture is what I was looking at. I was told its about 200 feet to the top on this one.
The third is the snow on the road we had one morning. Snow Monday 90 Degree heat Friday. Typical North Dakota weather.

Aren't the blowout preventers one of the parts that failed in the big BP mess (and it's affiliates, or owners) that's going on right now?
Quickly becoming one of the earths most directly caused man made disasters. Ya'll are working on the surface, these morans screwed up almost a mile under water! Sounds like you are doing a more careful job than those nuck futters did where it was hyper critical.

Good job to you, I hope everyone stays safe and gets their jobs done. Be damned the profits if it costs a life either human or in the wild.

What is all that white stuff on the road? Don't tell me it is still snowing there.

Has it stopped snowing yet?

I'm glad you've found a job you like.

I looks dirty, do they give you clothes and wash them for you?

I wouldn't fancy getting my clothes covered in sh1t.

Good week this week! I am being trained in to be the next Super Vac Truck driver when it arrives!

The next truck the company gets is likely going to be similar to this one.
They are Kenworth T800's set up with a high powered positive displacement gear type blower similar in design to that of a supercharger.
The tank holds about 60 barrels or around 2500 gallons.
The rig itself costs around $320K to $380K to set up depending on a few options plus the tank and pump capacities.

The first picture is the truck I was working with most of this week.
The second picture is the massive positive displacement air pump it used to produce the suction or pressure that it uses to load and unload.
The third picture is a load of blow-back slurry from a well. They had a problem with a large gas pocket blowing everything out of the well while it was being drilled so we ended up cleaning it up. It took roughly 40 truckloads over a two day period to clean out the rig tanks they captured it all in.

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One down side to my new position is that doing rig clean up work is often on locations that have high security levels so I cant take pictures of stuff while I am there working. The site I was on most of this week was one of them.

They have a new type of rig that walks itself from one hole to the next on site. Its supposed to be one of the most advanced and newest rigs of this type in the world! What they are experimenting with is drilling multiple wells on one location with each well having two individual bores going in different directions in it. This site will have 6 wells with a total of 12 bores on one location and is expected to produce around 20,000 to 30,000 barrels a day!
The concept is that by having multiple wells on one location that it will speed up the drilling time and reduce work loads related to setting up the wells. After the Wells are producing then all of the related service work is easier too due to the multiple wells are all being handled from one location.
While I was skimming oil sludge off of one pit they where trying to reduce the gas pressure in the well so that they could finish the last 1000 - 1500 feet of the main bore. Every hour or two they would stop the rig and vent the gas out to the flare and burn it off. At first I thought they blew something up! When they first ignite the flare it produces a massive oily fire ball about 40 feet across and 100 feet high! I could feel the heat off of it over 500 feet away at times! Then it dies off to a roaring jet about 5 - 10 feet across and 40 -50 feet high with a long billowing smoke cloud. I asked if I could take a picture of it but I was refused for security reasons.

However not all of what I see every day is oil field equipment and related things. The scenery I get to see is beautiful at times too. These are pictures of the 'Bears Den Road' in the badlands south of Watford City North Dakota.

Here are some random pictures from the Bears Den Road.

There are more reasons than just for the money as to why I like my job!

Not all of the oil field stuff is high tech machinery either. Some of it is still based on some very old systems.
Here is one of the old single cylinder natural gas burning stationary engines that they still use in some locations where electrical power is not practical. It gets its own fuel gas right from the well its pumping.

I was told that this one is a 40 Hp Waukesha engine and its based on a nearly identical design to the ones they first built over 70 years ago!

The first picture is the engine.
The second pictures is the site where the engine was used. That well is being reworked and cleaned out.
The third picture is the muck I get to suck up at different places.
The fourth and fifth pictures are from a double well site on the Bears Den road.
The sixth picture is a closer view of one of the smaller rigs that is cleaning out a well.

Very interesting job yesterday afternoon! Early yesterday I was on a Vac truck job that was canceled and we where sent to a new well that had just been finished in order to do some rain water clean up work. I was asking a lot of questions about the new well while we where cleaning up the big puddle around the well head.

Later yesterday we where called back to that well specifically asking for our truck to come back and do some more rain water clean up. When we got there we cleaned up the big puddle that had reformed around the well head and several rough neck workers came over and started taking the well head apart. OH Wow! I got to part of a well head replacement job!
What that entails is taking those massive valves and fitting completely off of the well casing.

Unfortunately this work is considered high risk and a level of security is imposed so I was not given permission to photograph any of it again.
But I can at least give you a description of what I saw while we where there!

Two massive valves are held in place by a large threaded collar that screws onto the well casing just below ground level. The casing is 16 inches in diameter and roughly 3/4 of an inch thick. It has an inner set of stepped flanges and grooves that mate up with a the first adapter assembly that everything bolts onto above that. That flange assembly has several levels of O ring seals that keep it from leaking. There are multiple inner O rings that seal around an 8 inch inner casing and multiple rings that seal around the outer flange steps and other overlapping points also. They are rated for a working pressure of 5000 PSI but are pre tested to over 20,000 PSI before they are certified.

Everything is massive and has to be moved by a chain hoist and a pay-loader. The threaded ring that holds the two parts together is about 5/8 if an inch thick and is double threaded for clockwise threads on one end and counter clockwise threads on the other. This is so that its not possible to ever unscrew a well head off of the casing. Once the collar is screwed down several pins inside the casing flanges and adapter interlock so that it can not be turned either direction. The big collar itself gets pinned in place and it too can not be turned afterwords once the well pressure is applied to it.

The reasons for all of this is to give it multiple redundant levels of sealing and tamper proof protection. The guys say the the well heads and casing connection are so strong the could be hit by a speeding semi truck and likely survive without leaking!

So what does an exposed well casing look like? Basically its just a big pipe with threads on it sticking about 1 foot out of the ground with a inner flange and collar assembly inside that with a 8 inch center hole. To look down it it just looks like a open pipe that is really deep!
The well is temporarily sealed by a single large service plug some distance down inside the casing. It works on the same principal as those expansion plugs that are used on sewer pipes. An inner screw assembly expands and anchors the plug into the casing wall and holds it in place while several layers of seals keep the oil and gas from leaking up from below it. Thats all that is keeping the high pressure natural gas and crude oil from blowing out while the head is being replaced.

They told me that if the plug came loose there is a good chance those of us standing near the well would probably never know it. But we would be on the world news by the next morning!

During the well work up to this point they found that this well is producing over 3000 PSI at the surface!

I will try and get some pictures of a complete well head of this type this week that has all the same components on it so that I can give everyone here a referance point to what I was working around. There are different heads that go on at different times during the well work and I dont have any referance pictures as of yet for this type that has these massive valve assemblies on it. The finished wells have a much smaller head unit like whats in the picture of the red well head in the earlier post.

I have such a cool job some days!

You know what would plug that leaking oil well in the Gulf? Mercury! Yes as toxic as it sounds, it could be pumped into the well, would sink on its own, greatly slowing the oil flow, if any would escape at all, and then plug the whole with concrete or similar.