-28 Deg C

Another record temperature this morning!

After waiting around for the reservoir for almost 3 days -delayed due to varying problems- we finally reached it at 1:30am yesterday morning. We had to stop again at 3:50am due to what is called a wash-out. Basically this is when a stand of drill pipes has a hole in it and the mud being pumped down escapes through the hole. This causes the pressure to drop under the hole and is problem that needs to be fixed immediately.

The new DSV, Slava, who arrived on Wednesday, has been very helpful and friendly. His daughter lives in Wales and he is very fluent in English-albeit with a really strong Deep South accent!! I had been warned of this but the Russian/Texan blend is rather difficult to imagine beforehand...he left Russia in 1992 and worked in the US for 9 years and the cap permanently screwed to his head really gives the game away ;-). Listening to him talk is just hilarious and a lot of the Russkis seem to find it very amusing too. Anyway, he knows I like to see how everything works and gave me a couple of photos of a broken pipe which caused a wash-out, which you can see here.

This well is a bit of an epic. Although in areas like the Caspian, wells can take a year and a half to drill, because of problems like high amounts of H2S and high pressures, wells here take an average of 10 days, with a record last week of 7.2 days. However, we are now on day 13 and still going.
The reservoir section followed the overall pattern of going wrong; when we finally reached the part where I needed samples, the mudloggers' computer stopped working properly. The problem was that the computer stopped showing the lag time, which is the time between when the drill bit reaches a depth, and when cuttings from that depth actually reach surface. Vavan had to keep trying to work it out himself, when he wasn't running to and fro the shale shakers.

So with a useless computer, an unhappy technician and no sleep at 4 am, I can't say I was too thrilled to hear about the wash-out, which made us loose 3 important samples. After describing all the samples so far, I went to sleep for an hour or so while Vavan kept an eye on operations. When I got up to do the morning report, he went to bed. I walked over to wake him up 3 hours later, came back and waited. Nothing. Phoned him on the mobile CB/phone. Waited again. Now anyone who knows me might realise that my natural impatience tends to be exacerbated when tired...so I marched over to the caravan and after 5 mins of loud banging on his door managed to wake him up again. He made it in the nick of time.

When we reached a certain formation, I had to make sure that the total depth of the well was still going to be the same-this can change because of the angle of the well. This is one of the more important responsibilites we have, simply because of the costs and mess involved if we get it wrong (too much=overspend on drilling; not enough=miss the bottom of the oil!) I had to do this for the first time at 3:30am, and luckily it was fine.

The rest of the day I spent inputing all the information gathered into Winlog and sending it on to various people. I went to bed at 9 happy in the knowledge that the CBL logging run planned for 3am was now going to be at 9am :-)

I have now just finished that; it involves logging the cemented section of the well, and is done by a Russian company as it is quite a basic op and they are a lot cheaper than SLB. Here is a picture of the lorry/unit-you can't see the wireline yet (cable they hook the tools onto) as it is lying on the decking but when taut it goes in a line from the back of their unit to about halfway up the rig. This is the same set-up as with SLB.

At midnight I will be doing a standard PEX run with SLB...good thing I got some sleep last night!