The only way to be certain that hydrocarbons can be found at a given location is to find them. Easy oil, oil that sprang to the earth’s surface in pools, ran out a long time ago. The easy source depleted, man searched for clues in topographical features indicating where more oil could be found if one would only dig. As the depths where oil could be found increased, man drilled holes with toothed drill bits on the ends of pipes. When it became harder and harder to read the rises and dips in the land, man stomped on the ground with massive hydraulic pistons and listened with sensitive electronic ears for echoes of the oil buried below.
When oil is located, a rig is brought in. A nozzled drill bit is stabbed into the ground, and a high volume and pressure of water is pumped through a pipe, jetting out of the nozzles, breaking the ground around the bit, and causing great turbulence. Weight is then borne down on top of the bit, pushing it in and forcing it deeper into the ground.
Extracting oil involves distending nature from its common state. Things are compressed, wound, stretched, heated, stacked, bolted, cooled, and raised. Nature is manipulated and defied. Engineering leverages attributes of certain natural laws to defeat others. The result is nature put into tension through the workings of machinery in tension controlled by tense men. Once the process begins, these tensions feed back into one another, as nature, machine, and man each acts, reacts, and acts again. The effort of man is focused on control of the tension. Accidental release of that control can spell disaster.
Vitalness: Vitality/Death
Everything that happens on the rig, must. With high-running costs and the precariousness of man’s hold on nature and the machine, timing is integral to exploration activity. Things must happen in a certain way exactly in order for other things to happen. All is interconnected in a complex web of activity to facilitate advancement down the critical path. The first thing that can go wrong is loss of time. Time is money. A rig day rental can cost half a million dollars; thus an hour spent is roughly twenty thousand dollars and a minute three hundred and fifty, whether used productively or not. Piss-poor planning can cause damage to equipment and even loss of the well. Loss of containment can damage the environment through spillage, while human loss, whether of limb or of life, is the ultimate price paid on a rig site.
These risks invigorate the crew, though; eagerness and enthusiasm can help defuse tension. When things go badly, the weight of the world is on the crew, and death descends on the rig. But even then there is fortitude. Potential losses—whether emotional, financial, ecological, or human—can easily reach horrific scales. The simplest tasks are tasks that are as vitally required as the most complex. Since everything done on the rig is a “must do,” rig workers develop a can-do attitude quickly.
Bobby, Son of the Rig
Bobby was a true son of the rig. At over ninety years old—decrepit, with see-through skin and rheumy eyes, a shuffle of a walk and scarcely any wind left in him, a Texan wheeze for a voice—Bobby was the oldest hand I had ever met on a rig. Bobby spent inordinately long hitches on the rig, rarely leaving “the accommodation,” and sometimes not even his room/office. As company rep, Bobby was boss of the rig. Bobby was so experienced he needed only to be on the rig for things to go well.
Sometimes I’d go to Bobby for one thing or another, and he’d look at me, stare for a moment, then slowly wipe his hands together and walk away. “I wash my hands of this—it’s your problem, deal with it, come back with good news,” this gesture seemed to say. It was a famous gesture of his.
The drill bit at the end of two thousand meters of pipe had gotten stuck down a three-thousand-meter hole. We couldn’t get it out, and we couldn’t push it farther in. We had tried everything—pumping up, pumping down, pulling the maximum over-pull, setting down all the weight, when word suddenly came over the clear call that Bobby was coming up to the rig floor. Ten minutes later, Bobby emerged from the accommodations on the main deck—a smudge, lost in his coveralls, hard hat, and rig gear, slowly shuffling across the main deck. Twenty-five minutes after he decided he would come up to the floor, Bobby made it to us, a journey that would take any of the rest of us no more than a few minutes. In his last climb up the steep stairs that connect the pipe deck to the drill floor, Bobby appeared in increments. Finally Bobby was on the floor, son of the rig, ready for action.
With Bobby at the break, we crowded behind him, peering over his shoulder at the gauges as best we could and then glancing over to the middle of the rig floor, where the pipe itself was alternately being pulled, compressed, and twisted.
As Bobby worked the pipe, he started cursing, or maybe praying, under his breath. We apprehensively watched Bobby get rough with the pipe. As the over-pull needle climbed to the red, the pipe stretched, pressuring up the whole world a notch. The sun flattened out in the rarefied atmosphere punctured by pops and clicks from the taut cables. Something gave.
As I turned to run, I found that the others were already on the move to the pseudosafety of the doghouse. I tripped over something on the floor and fell on my hands as the driller crashed past me—I expected the worst at any moment. Such is panic.
Bobby was standing with one hand on the break gently moving up and down, the pipe freed, the other hand waving about him as he looked back at us, then at the pipe, then back at us again. “What? What y’all start runnin’ like that there for? It’s just a little angry pipe—well, dang it, boys! Runnin’ like that? C’mon over here, Ismail, and get hold o’ this darn break. I need to get me out the weather, son, get over here—don’t be ’fraid, c’mon.”
That was Bobby, son of the rig. RIP.
From “Drill Bits: Life on the Oil Rig.” Bidoun, no. 10 (Spring 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Mohamed Mansour. Used with permission of the author.
Mohamed Mansour, from “Drill Bits: Life on the Oil Rig.” After graduating from the American University in Cairo, Mansour served in the Egyptian army and then joined Schlumberger, working on the rigs described in this essay. The work involves “stress levels that are hard to sustain,” Mansour writes. “I escaped in song, in the privacy of ambient noise, at the top of my lungs.” During the Arab Spring, he was crushed in a stampede during a demonstration in Cairo. Soon enough, Mansour said, “things opened up, we lost the revolution, and the wheels of industry started to turn again.”
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