Collapse Cafe 9/21/2014

[roamer]

To me the far far more interesting and fruitful conversation we could all be having is how to evolve new solar based lifestyles using a hybridization of the tremendous amount of technology we have available at this point.  Which is exactly what i plan to focus on once i have the money saved up to get rolling on it.

I think that sounds completely reasonable. I should mention, back when we were running MWD back in the day, some of the hands were literally living on the rigs year round, going to the top of the list for the next job, not having to pay rent, saving their money, and then  buying charter fishing companies with their money, one even bought half of some small island in the Caribbean. Certainly in the kind of career you are embarking on you make hay while the sun shines, I've been through two busts now, one of them while working on the rigs, and when things slow down, they slow hard. It happened in the Bakken during the spring and summer of 2009, and it certainly can happen again if the current heavy duty supply increases in the US continue to put the hurt on investment in less savory places, geo-politically speaking.

Well i'm pretty much going to be living on a rig until i either have enough money accrued or the boom goes bust.  Its really kind of optimal for my goals.  The money i'm saving in rent and other living costs is all going into savings.  I'll also get some time off now and then between rig moves to go camp, check out interesting farms and do things you cant do when you're tied down.  Though i have no regrets about what i've done so far with my life and can see unique advantages to the way its gone so far, i do wish i had known about this option earlier I may have been much further along in my goal of starting that solar hybrid expiremental farm i dream about.

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[RE]

To me the far far more interesting and fruitful conversation we could all be having is how to evolve new solar based lifestyles using a hybridization of the tremendous amount of technology we have available at this point.  Which is exactly what i plan to focus on once i have the money saved up to get rolling on it.

I think that sounds completely reasonable. I should mention, back when we were running MWD back in the day, some of the hands were literally living on the rigs year round, going to the top of the list for the next job, not having to pay rent, saving their money, and then  buying charter fishing companies with their money, one even bought half of some small island in the Caribbean. Certainly in the kind of career you are embarking on you make hay while the sun shines, I've been through two busts now, one of them while working on the rigs, and when things slow down, they slow hard. It happened in the Bakken during the spring and summer of 2009, and it certainly can happen again if the current heavy duty supply increases in the US continue to put the hurt on investment in less savory places, geo-politically speaking.

Well i'm pretty much going to be living on a rig until i either have enough money accrued or the boom goes bust.  Its really kind of optimal for my goals.  The money i'm saving in rent and other living costs is all going into savings.  I'll also get some time off now and then between rig moves to go camp, check out interesting farms and do things you cant do when you're tied down.  Though i have no regrets about what i've done so far with my life and can see unique advantages to the way its gone so far, i do wish i had known about this option earlier I may have been much further along in my goal of starting that solar hybrid expiremental farm i dream about.

HEY!  I think I have a NEW CAREER as MATCHMAKER!

Roamer is like Moriarty's IDEAL Son-in-Law.  Way better Catch for his daughter than some old fart Sugar Daddy! 

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/59Hj7bp38f8?feature=player_detailpage" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/59Hj7bp38f8?feature=player_detailpage</a>

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[MKing]

Looked like he was transmitting from a mancamp. We didn't even have telephone service to some of those, back in the day. I also didn't catch whether or not his service uses mud pulse telemetry (the stuff I grew up on) or if he is in on the new electro-magnetic stuff, I've seen the demos at conferences and whatnot but it wasn't around back when we were inventing these types of technologies. He probably isn't using the old steering tools anymore, talk about old technology,  my guess is there is no training anymore for how to use a whipstock either, but I am curious, are they still using single shots to occasionally benchmark the MWD tools? Are well bore surveys accepted from the MWD surveyors or does the directional driller run a multi-shot for the final wellbore location?

Sorry I wasn't allowed to respond to your foray into the Bakken earlier Roamer, it was verboten. Enjoy the coming winter!!! Spent one up near Lesser Slave Lake many many moons ago, you never really forget that kind of cold after having been through a winter of it.

Hey MKing we're still using mud pulse on the majority of the jobs here.

That's good to know. They were pimping the electro-magnetic stuff pretty hard at the last trade show, and it looked cooler than crud, but I have not a clue as to its real world effectiveness. What is the concentration of triplex pumps like nowadays? Back in the day when you got struck with a duplex it would make shit out of the signal, and your transmission speeds would go right into the toilet. Triplex, not so much. I'm betting that you guys nowadays are transmitting far faster than back when this stuff was invented as well, hell I was getting off the rigs about the time PCs were becoming available to do the signal processing. Nowadays I imagine you've got PC based stuff everywhere.

  My understanding is that in the Bakken the depth makes a full on EM job not possible, though we do have a hybrid tool which has both EM and mud pulse which is gaining popularity.  No whipstocks, no multi-shots either, the Drillers accept our surveys as long as qualifiers are good. Wouldn't of even known what you were talking about with whipstocks and multi-shots but for the fact that i've been reading some old school drill engineering textbooks for extra background on the rig.

Old school....damn this is making me feel like a dinosaur.   

I'll be really curious to see where directional drilling tech goes in the coming years, solid state gyros, EM and rotary steerable systems all look pretty interesting.  Could definitely keep drilling costs at bay while we go after the difficult oil.

Rotary steerables have been around for quite some time already, they just keep getting better. Once upon a time any rotary couldn't be steerable (we called 'im banana motors), but now with some of the adjustable "on the fly" technology, folks like CLR are blasting out the entire lateral section on a single bit and trip, including doing any necessary sliding for course corrections. Back in my day we had to trip to switch out the BHA like every day or three.

And Roamer, in case you aren't aware of it, you are ALREADY in difficult oil. Horizontals in the shale are a pain, between shale swelling, cave ins, keyholing, those damn fracture sets occasionally deciding to let loose a bursts of something that requires all sorts of mud column corrections to keep it under control. But for all of that, they are drilling these things in days now, as compared to the weeks it once took.

Enjoy!! It is certainly worthwhile and valuable experience for youngsters, good money, puts hair on your chest, etc etc. But it took only one lingering image for me to stop doing it, it was northern Saskatchewan in January, -40C or so, your breath would freeze on your glasses, if you climbed a ladder with unprotected skin you would be lucky you didn't freeze to it, and there was this old driller...climbing up the ladder to the drill floor...he must have been 60 or so...had been doing this his entire life...and I happened to be outside for some reason doing something, watching him make his way slowly up that ladder, age and cold were getting him in the joints, and I thought to myself, "Fuck working out here for the rest of my life..". Didn't even have the kids yet that would have made the job that much more difficult, could just see what a future consisting of decades of this gypsy lifestyle of work would look like.

7 months and a 60% pay cut later, I was in an office.

I was involved in the Macondo prospect relief well effort, many years later, got called into action because I was like the only person in the building with direct experience with MWD and directional drilling, the folks I was working with were generally academics and didn't have a clue how this kind of stuff worked, the levels of precision possible, miles underground and miles away. That work then led to a spot on a team doing outside technical review on new MMS regulations for the deepwater GOM. And all of this was because the experience I once gained, and the path you are starting down, has more value than you might ever imagine, in places in this country, companies and academia, government and research organizations, that like to THINK they know how something works, versus how it DOES work.

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[MKing]

HEY!  I think I have a NEW CAREER as MATCHMAKER!

Roamer is like Moriarty's IDEAL Son-in-Law.  Way better Catch for his daughter than some old fart Sugar Daddy! 

A strong historical component of the oil and gas industry is mentoring. Hooking up the old and experienced with the young and innocent, hopefully to impact enough information that they don't get themselves killed, or everyone around them. I started out with a geo-mag scientist with a PhD from University of Michigan I believe, hopefully Roamer has been hooked up with someone who will explain and help him along the way as well, even if it is learning the small part he is engaged in right now.

Roamer isn't sitting around with hopes and dreams in one hand and shit in another, wondering what sheeple and doomers wonder, he is DOING. DOING is good, and he is DOING in an industry that has some short shrift with slackers, whiners, petition signers, academics, pseudo intellectuals clocking time, and basically all of those things where deadlines don't mean much, pressure to perform is minimal and certainly not related to someone's well being, and you can screw up all day long and as long as you kiss ass on the boss, it doesn't matter.

So good for Roamer for gettin'er done. Now if we can just get the next X,XXX,XXX youngsters of this world off their asses and into generating results, we could all die happy that the Boomers haven't wrecked the country as badly as it generally appears.

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