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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SEDCO 445 who wrote (183156)	3/23/2014 3:16:37 PM
From: JimisJim	4 Recommendations Recommended By 22jt Bruce L CommanderCricket SEDCO 445 Respond to of 206181

The skill set for the average E&P worker offshore has changed quite a bit. I think I posted here about training classes I used to help develop for VRC drilling systems, automated iron roughnecks, pipe deck machines, pipe handling/racking systems, etc. -- in the '80s and '90s, a lot of the people showing up for training were senior level drillers, assistant drillers and a lot of field engineers/maintenance and troubleshooting types and they were typically boomers with various digits missing or other "war" scars. By the time I left VRC in 2003, the people showing up were young, wore glasses and all had laptops and knew how to use them. By then, the average high spec offshore drilling system was more about sitting in chairs that looked like Star Trek in climate controlled cabins (lots of glass, of course) and using joysticks, touch-screen computers and other very high tech man-machine interfaces. Very few people were left toting grease guns, etc. as just deck hands/maintenance techs. The last 10 or more years, I've been working mostly with platform performance and monitoring equipment and now almost solely with subsea engineers on equipment/systems that control/keep tabs on mooring systems, subsea risers and riser towers, CALM buoys (and other buoys associated with offloading oil, etc. to/from FPSOs and/or spars, semi-submersibles, etc.) and it involves a lot of computer hardware, software and all sorts of high tech senor equipment, none of which had even been invented until about 2005 and later. The people needed for that stuff all have to be computer savvy, and anyone involved with deployment or routine maintenance also has to have skills with piloting ROVs or be highly trained subsea mechanical, hydraulic and electrical engineers. Offshore, at least, the number of people doing purely physical labor has dwindled while the number of people who are high-tech literate has increased quite a bit. Everywhere you look on these deepwater rigs there are computer screens and such and folks who have to know what it all means and what to do with the information. There are growing numbers of offshore rigs where many of the actual equipment operators are "on the beach" controlling equipment remotely. From what I've seen, the industry has done a good job working with colleges, universities and trade/tech schools training a new generation of rig workers for offshore work. As SEDCO says, the average onshore rig has more low-tech manpower needs, but easily trained -- and the onshore sector is changing to look more and more like the offshore operators as the rigs and equipment they need to make high spec horizontal holes with multi-stage frac'ing is a lot more similar to offshore operations than in the past. Ten or 15 years ago, there was some concern about a skills drain as more and more boomers retired from rig work, but the nature of the work and the training needed has changed to the point where many of those skills are less in demand than they used to be. And for $10K-$20 you can get intensive training from companies like NOV that is specific to the equipment they build and sell. Companies like VRC/NOV recognized 20 years ago that training could be a significant profit center even during down times in the offshore OSX sector.