Thread: Random offshore pics

Originally Posted by dirk diggler

Attachment 50650
Elite Drilling E-08 Rig

Here’s a pic from work tonight. I survived 2 weeks quarantine in remote rubber farm resort just South of Udon and now sitting here on top of a nearby mountain/national park.

It has taking us 12 days to rig up for this job and safe to say everyone has lost a bit of weight. It’s been bloody hot up here and it was a relief to come into night shift on Monday.

Cool. How did you get used to night shift ?

Looks like a very organised site.

Chinese outfit.

Mine less epic than these, just boring robots in the sea, you can't really see them, unless something goes wrong.

Originally Posted by dirk diggler

We've been rigging up for our next well this week and today we've split the crew for days/nights. So I stayed up late last night drinking beer with the plan to sleep late but woke up at 6am anyway. Revert to plan B, stay up, do a 5k run and a swim then hopefully get some sleep before work.

The first night is the worst. If anyone is struggling they can go and find a corner and get their head down for a bit. It's no big deal, we're not operational yet.

I did some drill rig work in 2009. Couldn't get used to the nights. Especially those crossover half nights. Glad I went to service and then coil and then instrumentation

Hey backspin . Can you nip down to the store and ask the storeman for the key to the V door. Theres a good chap

^^ Nice one Dirk...

I'd be fascinated to spend a couple of days at your site. Not offshore but the same stuff really.

I'll bring a few pies!

Seeing your portakabin, small story. In 2000 I was on a platform off Malabo in Equatorial Guinea. The platform had a rig onboard with all of the accompanying service companies/hands. Just before 6 a.m. one morning, I was having my customary cigarette outside on the lifeboat deck (the only permissable smoking area on the platform), when the dulcet tones of the OIM came across the tannoy telling me to go to his office. Up I went, to hear that the night shift Schlumberger logger (a very tall Texan female) had been found hanged in their portakabin when her relief went up there at shift changeover. There was no note, no emails to family or friends, nothing, so why she actually did it is anybodys guess. She'd been sat with some of the drill crew at the midnight meal, and seemed normal, and that was the last anyone saw her alive.

You can imagine, a US citizen found dead in Equatorial Guinea. The local police and a doctor came out in one of our helicopters, which was a complete waste of time. I was the Field Logistics Superinendent at the time so was heavily involved in all of the aftermath. I and the Deck Foreman placed her body in a body bag and put it into a stokes litter (a rigid form of stretcher), and she was craned directly onto the helideck next to the shutdown chopper to take her ashore.

She was around late 20's I guess, very striking as thin and tall (nearly 6 foot), with very bright long red hair. There isn't a lot of headroom in a portakabin, and how she'd managed to hang herself was a complete mystery.

Sorry to hijack the thread Dirk, just your photos of the rig and your portakabin brought it back.

Thanks for sharing PAG. That’s a really sad story. You just don’t know what a person is going through.

My Dad had a similar story where the had to freeze a guy sitting on a chair so they could put him on the chopper and my Dad had to sit next to him. A heart attack I believe.

Originally Posted by Mendip

^^ Nice one Dirk...

I'd be fascinated to spend a couple of days at your site. Not offshore but the same stuff really.

I'll bring a few pies!

Back up mate, I got the pies covered!

Yeah, Mendys would be full of peas and other junk. Id sooner share a ‘decent drink’ with him.










not really

A fire on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico erupted after a gas leak from an underwater pipeline sparked a blaze, according to Mexico’s state-owned Pemex petrol company.

Even if the gas doesn't ignite these events from ruptured high pressure gas lines are extremely dangerous to shipping.

The 'aerated' water (due go the gas in the water column) can cause a ship to lose all buoyancy and sink remarkably quickly.

Originally Posted by Mendip

A bit slacker on PPE requirements in the 70s as well by the looks of your pics!

Even today the drill mud seems pretty harmful to marine life. When we do seabed surveys around wellheads the seabed is completely devoid of life where the drill mud has built up. I think it's boron they use these
days?

Many moons ago, freshly armed with my geology degree, I nearly went into mud logging on the drilling rigs. In the end I started my working life tunneling, but still ended up offshore eventually.

This thread is fascinating to me mendip and airport1 keep the pics and narrative coming. I'm curious to know about the role of a Geologist on an oilfield scenario? Is that called soft rock geology? I'm in the mining game (or was) and have a lot of geo mates that either specialise in copper/gold Iron ore/ base metals etc. You get the idea. How do geologists on a rig roll? It's definately gotta be interesting work

Originally Posted by Mendip

I remember where I was when the Piper Alpha disaster happened... driving down through France for a geological mapping project as part of my degree... that would eventually lead to my working offshore.

Even today, 32 years later, the breakdown in communications and safety procedures that led to the disaster are regularly used in safety talks offshore.

Yes I remember going to a safety course that was specific to the piper alpha. Even though we were miners there was still lessons to be learnt. Quite sobering it was.

is that rig a bit of an antique ?

no top drive

A pic from the well site I took yesterday morning.

Sunrise? Looks good.

Yeah sunrise. I'll get a better picture once I'm on days at the end of the trip.

We hit gas tonight so should be home by the end of the month.

It's been a quick well this one. Looking forward to some days off without yard work as the next well is not scheduled until March. We only had 2 wells this year, 3 last year but there are 4 planned for next year so it's gonna be a busy one.

Originally Posted by beerlaodrinker

This thread is fascinating to me mendip and airport1 keep the pics and narrative coming. I'm curious to know about the role of a Geologist on an oilfield scenario? Is that called soft rock geology? I'm in the mining game (or was) and have a lot of geo mates that either specialise in copper/gold Iron ore/ base metals etc. You get the idea. How do geologists on a rig roll? It's definately gotta be interesting work

They sit in their shack beating off all day while roughnecks deliver samples from the drill every couple hours or so through a little door.

Originally Posted by Backspin

and then instrumentation

Well not all bad then?

Originally Posted by Backspin

They sit in their shack beating off all day while roughnecks deliver samples from the drill every couple hours or so through a little door.

That's only when they're on shift... so only half the story.

They can also spend the other 12 hours 'beating off' in their cabins... I would imagine.

But anyway, I'm a different kind of geologist... I work on boats, not rigs, so it's nothing like that!

The Geologists are my heroes offshore. They have all the well data backed up on their system and just after midnight I go to their cabin get all that shit copy and pasted onto a thumb drive to paste into my report.