Offshore Drilling-A Series Of Instructional Posts
In my youth early technical career, I was sent out to a rig in the gulf to monitor one of the first drilling mud flow computers in the world. My company designed and built it for Flour Inc. As an Engineering Tech. I actually did a lot of the assembly and testing of the main electronics gear, so I was a logical pick to go. It was the best one month vacation I had ever had. The computer performed flawlessly, so I had a lot of time to fish. It was a Exxon rig and the Engineer I was working with told me to bring my fishing gear. We both caught an enormous amount of just about any Gulf fish you can imagine. The Cook was glad to clean and prepare all of it. It was all fresh and absolutely delicious. That was in the ’60s.
The mud flow computer measured drilling mud going into the well being drilled and measured the flow coming out. If they were close to equal after straining out the chips, all was well. If there was a serious loss in volume it indicated some porosity in the bore. They had mud additives to plug that loss. If the volume coming out suddenly increased, the BOP ( Blow Out Preventer) was activated automatically and they had time to do measurements and adjust mud density to balance the pressure rise.
That was just one advance that made drilling offshore safer and environmentally safer.
The following link is a series of posts put together by a person who knows the subject of OCS drilling intimately.
If you really want to learn a lot about Offshore, read all 14 posts. Start at the bottom of the list and work to the top. Each has a
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next>
at the bottom…don’t miss the rest!
I am still in the process of going through them. There is a lot there.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Marc GREAT post! My dearly departed Pop worked for Baroid from when he brassed out of George Patton’s 3rd army until 1984 or so. While I’m no petro engineer or geologist a good bit of his knowledge did rub off. I only wish more folks took the time to learn more of the ins n outs of the oilfield…….