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.
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.
posted by Patrick at 10:29 PM
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