Scribing Up.

Another fabulous day on the rig, another BHA(bottom hole assembly). This means we have changed out all the downhole drilling equipment for another set-up. Why? Well we were trying to kick off from the present well path after leaving part of another BHA in the hole. So we have to be able to steer hole away from the “fish” or other items lost in hole.
There are, as always, more than one way to skin a cat. With this BHA we are using a motor with a bend in it. Which is exactly that, a mud motor, which turns the bit and nothing else as you pump mud through it. Above this spinning bit is a bend of 1.4º that can be oriented when we get down to the bottom to point the bit in the direction you want to go. So all you have to do is be able to tell which way the bit is pointing when it is 10,000ft away.
Imagine you have a 1,000ft long drinking straw and you turned one end half a turn, how much would the other end turn? Not one bit. It would just twist up. No imagine a piece of drill pipe, same problem. There is no way you can mark up a pipe at surface and know where the end is pointing. Enter the MWD engineer. We have a tool in the hole that will tell us which way is up, using magnetometers measuring the magnetic field of the earth and its just behind the motor.
Now we get to the fun part. When everything is screwed together the bend in the motor will never line up with the reference line on the MWD tool. So we have to measure the angle between the “highside” of the MWD tool and the direction the bit is pointing in. This is the Scribeline Offset. It is a very very very important measurement. If it is wrong wells have been drilled in entirely the wrong direction, which might lead to some very probing questions.
The Directional Driller marks the highside of the motor. And then transfers this highside line up the tool to the MWD scribeline. Then he marks that line, with a torch strapped to the MWD tool or a polystyrene cup and the whole thing is lifted into the air and the line on the motor is checked with the cup or torch. Any adjustment is made an the tool lowered down again. The angle from the MWD scribeline to the Motor highside is then measured, from us to them, clockwise looking downhole. The scope for error at this point is huge, as you have just introduced a human element. At this point we are like airline pilots one wrong move could cost lives! Well, not really, but you could cut the tension with a knife. The tool is run into the well. Highside is pointed where we want to go and mud pumped through the string to make the bit, and the bit only, turn. This is Sliding, drilling without rotating, and the bit will slip slide away from the old hole into a whole new place of its own.

Parallelism, spinning plates

This seems to be a very philosophical title but there is no need to be as deep. The reason we are all here, and when I say here I mean the rig, is Money. Money we all need to pay for and fuel or homes, feed our families and provide us with a few luxuries to make spending the extra time away from home worth the while.
Some folks on the rig are happy with that life. They enjoy or have become content with consistency of their day to day work and the familiarity of their surroundings on the rig. These people are part of the institution that is every individual place offshore and this is their place. The institution makes it easy to dissociate itself with the other part of that persons life that takes place with their family and friends in a different place and time from this. It is almost as if the two existences run in parallel. For even when the crew member isn’t here there is a presence, reminders and markers of that persons place on the rig.
Others on the rig attempt to move away from this place as often as their day to day responsibilities allow them. They are living a life of escapism into worlds of computer games and movies emerging occasionally to sustain their profession or body. When they return to the other half of their lives that happens away from this place do they still try to escape from that place too? To live your life outside of reality is another parallelism. You are here but not, you are elsewhere but not. And then to be at home is a third and fourth parallel on which you live life.
The ability to cope with this parallelism is what make some people better at working away. They are able to sustain a parallel existence. A life which changes irregularly and has a blocky profile as their time switches between each parallel.
I am not a person who can live in too many parallel worlds. I am bad at keeping the plates spinning in my absence. I let them crash to the floor, one by one, until there are one or two wobbling away in the foreground my limit is three. Home(Jenny and Family), work and one other, which is usually the plate that falls off and I put back on quickly while no one watches. This means that home and work wobble and the other plate could be the first one that comes to hand as I stoop down quickly to pick it off the floor. This could be Sailing, Motorbike or Friends.
So the two or three parallels that I live on when offshore are my bandwidth, the speed of my connection with the outside world. A world of parallels on which I live, work and exist. These parallels change when I am not offshore. They drop an octave to a place where my three parallels are different again and the work plate rarely makes it off the ground…..unless I pick it up by mistake.