To all,
Good close at/or near today's high. Now for a little levity, sorry if this has been posted before. I am sure some of you in the industry have heard it before.
Everyone was walking around with their (non-metal) hardhats tied to
their belts. Thinking this was some obscure oilfield fashion I neglected to do the same,and was promptly told to get off the drill floor until rectified. I was then given the reason.
But... before the story, just a quick background. Standard method of
drilling an oil well is to drill a large OD hole and then cement a
slightly smaller OD casing (tubular steel) in the hole to maintain hole integrity, by preventing caving in or to isolate pressure zones
(amongst many other things). So you might drill a 12.25inch OD hole to a certain depth, isolate it with 9.625inch OD casing and then continue deeper using,say an 8.5in drill bit. The casing is cemented in place by pumping slurry down the interior and out through an orifice at the bottom of the casing(casing shoe), thence up and around the casing in the casing/hole annulus.
OK. The Story:
A few (mumble mumble) years back, while setting casing, a roustabout
leaned over the open top of the casing and peered in. In doing so, his aluminium hard hat fell into the hole. The casing was at (mumble, mumble) feet,but generally deep, call it 10,000ft. Generally, if something is dropped down hole, you can a) cement it in place, b) drill or mill on it, or c)grapple it out of the hole.
In case a), the casing had not been cemented, and the hardhat was
blocking the casing shoe orifice so cementing was out of the question. b) was no good, cause it'd either damage the casing shoe or just squash the hard hat into the casing shoe, and you probably wouldn't get a decent cement job. Very important to get a good casing job.
d) (previously not mentioned) which entailed pulling 10,000ft of casing back out of the hole, get the hard hat and then re-run the casing)would take hours, perhaps days. And time is money
So c) it was. Numerous grappling tools were run. Couldn't use a magnet grapple, as you might for a sledge head, as the hard hat was aluminium. This operation took many (add a figure depending on how many beers the guys have bought you)days, and of course the daily running cost of a drilling rig is in the 10's to 100's of thousands of dollars a day.
The hard hat is eventually wrested out of the hole at huge cost in time and money and the Toolpusher takes it over to it's owner and says, "here's your $&$&^^@#!#%# hat, you're fired".
The now Ex-employee then replies, "Well, I won't be needing this then", and drops the hard hat back down the well and walks away. |
