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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SiouxPal who wrote (193160)	6/6/2010 7:29:27 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 361538

It only makes news when somebody has a bad feeling and something bad happens. People have bad feelings about jobs every day. Mostly, we don't hear about it for 20 years; sometimes 6. ROCKMAN on June 6, 2010 - 10:07am aardy -- several bad outcomes. The least serious is that you pump mud (actually the liquid portion of the mud) into a productive reservoir and reduce or completely destroy its production capabilities. Next worse is the sucking action caused by this lost circulation into a porous rock: the drill pipe can get stuck (differential sticking) and you might have to leave some of it in hole and then drill a side track. Next you can actually cause the rocks to break apart and the hole will collapse. More lost drill pipe and a side track. The worse case is when you have such lost circulation in one zone while another zone is kicking you. You lighten mud weight to stop the LC but that makes the kick worse. The primary purpose of the multiple csg runs is to minimize this range of too light/heavy a MW. Probably the scariest well I've been on in the GOM DW was about 6 years ago. They had set csg and were drilling ahead at 22,000'. And then they started to loss circ. They weren't sure where but it might have been at the previous csg shoe. They lost 60,000 bbls of OBM while drilling. No mud ever returned to the surface. So no mud log telling them if they had drilled oil/NG, no LWD to estimate pore pressure, no mud parameters to tell if the MW was being cut by oil, NG or water. And most importantly, no way to tell if the well was kicking. They put very heavy drill mud on the outside of the drill pipe but that would have not stopped a blow out coming up the inside of the DP. Took me 6 days to log that 2,500' of open hole. I ran pressure logs in the wet reservoir they cut: 19,000 psi bottom hole pressure. They were probably very lucky they didn't find oil/NG in that sand: a blow out could have easily happened. How scary was it? Some of the hands were sleeping in the escape capsules when they were off tower. And this insane risk was taken by a well known and very experience operator. Needless to say someone very high up in the company was willing to risk the 130 souls onboard that drillship to get this well down. Equally needless to point out: that person never set foot on that rig. We just finished the job, went home, cashed our pay checks and then tried to forget about it.