Living in Deadhorse

During my time working on the north slope I live in the Schlumberger camp in Deadhorse. There is basically nothing up here except for oil companies so all of them have to provide housing for their employees. Our camp holds about 75 people at one time. Most people work up here on a two weeks on / two weeks off rotation so everyone kind of checks in and out of rooms. This is our cafeteria. We eat all three meals in here unless we decide to go to someone else's camp to eat. The food is usually fairly decent because the companies realize they need to feed the big guys who work up here pretty well.
This is one of our TV lounges with a big screen and satellite setup. It is one of the popular places to spend time when you're not working. People also like to play cards, play ping pong or fooseball, get on the computer, read, or drive to the big BP camp to play basketball during their down time.
This is my new room; I got moved outside to this unit about a week ago. It is essentially the same as the other rooms on the inside. Basically everything out here is built in modules like this because construction is such a challenge up here. It's not bad having to go outside the main camp to get to my room since it is the summer. It has actually warmed well into the 60's recently. The main draw back of being outside is that the world famous Alaska mosquitoes are beginning to appear
The good thing about being in the annex units is that I have a pretty good view of the tundra now. This is a picture of a caribou from the steps to my room; this buck was within 50 feet of me when I was going to bed. Oh yeah, just so you know, this picture was taken after midnight. The sun doesn't go down for 82 days at this latitude.
The caribou are starting to migrate back to the coast from the Brooks Range. It is mostly males now, but there should be a whole herd up here within a couple of weeks. The caribou wander everywhere including onto the gravel pads at the drilling rigs. You can see two caribou to the left of me in the picture. You can see I have a new green hard hat. They give them to all the people who have been in the field less than a year to warn others that we may do something stupid at any time!
I have seen a ton of Caribou and two arctic foxes since I've been here. There are also a lot of birds who like the wetlands formed by the snow melting. Unfortunately, I haven't seen a bear yet. This is a picture from last year of a bear right outside the wireline shop where I work. I'm still hoping to see a bear and a musk ox before I return home. (I bet I could have said that was me in the picture and scared the hell out of my mom!)

Working in Prudhoe Bay

I have been working here in the Prudhoe Bay area for a little over three weeks now. I'm pretty excited because I have a week off to explore Alaska starting tomorrow. I have spent about half my time working in the shop or going to jobs on location and the other half learning more about the oil industry and Schlumberger in particular. Hopefully these pictures will give you some idea what I have been up to. I am working with the wireline segment of the company. We drive this big fancy truck called a logger to a well and lower all sorts of very advanced equipment into the hole in order to get information about the well or do work on the well. All the equipment is attached to a very strong conducting wire that transmits information back to the logger. The logger has a spool and winch system of over four miles of wireline. The trailer behind the logger is called the whale and it holds all the wireline tools and everything needed to work on them. The whale is unique to the north slope because the crews need a warm place to work on the tools during the winter; most locations just keep everything in pickups.
This is the inside of the logger; I spend a lot of time in here during jobs because after the tools are rigged up and run into the hole everything is controlled from here during the several hours of logging. There are computers to the left for operating the tool, a unit to the right to operate the winch, pressure valves in the middle, and through the window you can see the spool of wire.
This is the inside of the whale. There are tons of tools for taking apart equipment and working on it. Under the work bench are racks that hold all the wireline tools; they are all shaped like pipes so they will fit in the hole. In the back there are also three beds for when the job takes more than one day.
This is one of the rigs I have worked on. It is an enormous place with tons of ridiculous machinery; it is impressive how much work goes into tapping a reservoir. If you look to the left you can see that the whole thing is on wheels. They actually drive this monstrosity to different locations when they have completed a well.
This is Andrew, one of the operators I have worked with, removing a pressure control pump on the rig floor. It is cool to be working on the north slope because it is the nations largest oil field so it has some of the biggest and best equipment. We also get to work with some of the most advanced tools because there is a lot of directional drilling because you can only drill from certain surface locations in order to minimize environmental impact.
Some times we are asked to do work on a well where drilling has already been completed, and the rig has moved to a different location leaving behind a well head to control the pressure on the well. There is about twelve feet of valves and rams above the ground in each one of these well houses. There is a well in each one of the blue units in the picture; you can see what I mean about drilling only in certain locations in order to protect the environment.
The well head job we did in that picture was really interesting because it was on this island. Endicott Island is a man made island and road about a mile off the north shore of Alaska. It was cool to drive out into the Arctic Ocean for a job especially since a lot of it was frozen. It's pretty impressive to see an ocean frozen. There is another offshore rig nearby about seven miles off the coast that you have to take a helicopter to during the summer, but during the winter the ocean freezes over enough to drive to it. I hope these pictures give you an idea of what I have been doing; I tried not to get into too many details because it can get quite complicated.

Schlumberger in Alaska

It's time to start posting on the blog again now that I am a long ways away in Alaska. I'm interning with Schlumberger from May 29th to August 9th. My first week was spent in Houston training with about 100 other interns destined for a variety of locations. I also had to do a water survival and HUET (Helicopter Underwater Egress Training) for those of us going to Alaska or offshore. After that I spent three days in Anchorage getting proper identification and training to work on the North Slope. It was mostly about safety and environmental impact. Now I am in Deadhorse, Alaska near Prudhoe Bay at the Northern coast of Alaska. This is a picture of me in my work clothes, my Schlumberger blue coveralls, hardhat, and safety glasses. This is pretty much my outfit everyday for twelve hours while I'm working. Pretty damn good looking!
This is my room at the Schlumberger camp. It gets the job done, but it's not fancy. It's smaller than any of my college dorms, and I have a large snoring roommate. The room also comes complete with pictures of the family of the man who usually lives in this spot. As a summer intern I don't qualify for my own permanent room so I just find an empty space when people leave for their two weeks off after they have worked two weeks.
This is another angle of my room. This is my side still. On the bottom is the thousand dollars worth of arctic gear Schlumberger had to buy for me even though the temperature probably won't dip low enough to use it the whole summer. Oh well, free stuff for me! These two pictures show my entire side of the room. It's the same on the other side, not very big.
This is the Schlumberger camp. The left side is the drilling and measurements shop where I have been working. The right side is the cafeteria and lounge and other amenities. My room and all the others is behind all the equipment. All the equipment is there to construct more Schlumberger buildings so more people can work up here. At 75 dollars a barrel they can't pump the oil fast enough! They're hiring people like crazy.

This is the view from camp. There is melting tundra, other oil field related buildings, flat ground, and big skies as far as the eye can see. Not terribly exciting, but I'm hoping to see some caribou or polar bears before I leave. That's about it for now. I hope to post some pictures of me at an actual drilling location next time. You'll probably get to see some of me a lot dirtier too; those coveralls didn't stay looking that new for long.