In this month two years ago I spent my 30th Birthday and Hallowe’en working onboard a drill ship as a well site Geologist. This month’s blog aims to give you a flavor of what life on board was like and the challenges of being one of only 4 women onboard a ship of 160!
Life Onboard as a Wellsite Geologist
I was lucky enough to experience working onboard a deep-water drill ship in the South Atlantic as a Well-site Geologist. I spent around 4 weeks onboard in total, working 12 hours for each day on this 188m long vessel.
I was one of two well-site geologists on board, so we worked back-to-back. They would cover the day shift (6am to 6pm) and I the night shift. The majority of my duties included collecting data from the drilling (mud, cuttings and other data) and collate these into a report each day for the staff onshore. This involved working with many different people on board, from the big boss (the Company Man) to the various contractors working on collecting the drill cuttings, wireline data and drilling mud data. Onshore there were additional workers such as the Operation Geologist and the Pore Pressure Engineers to discuss the well with. A large amount of the time, the well was not actively drilling for various reasons such as casing (stabilizing the hole), and on those shifts I did a lot of reading of my book!!!
There was quite a lot of down time to explore the ship and chat to the various people working there. I shared a cabin with my back-to-back geologist, so during my shift I had to keep myself busy. There was always a lot of great food to eat, the kitchen even baked me a cake for my birthday! There was also a small gym (running on a treadmill when there is a lot of large waves was fun!) and a common room for table tennis and film watching. There was even a sauna, so we were well looked after and entertained.
Safety Onboard
The ultimate aim of everyone on board is to drill the well without incident or loss of life. Safety is therefore central to life on the ship. Prior to arriving offshore, intense training was completed to outline emergency procedures if things were to go wrong. Training covered first aid, fire safety, life boat evacuations and survival suit rescue. By completing ‘evacuations’ in the swimming pool, you should be familiar with your equipment, allowing a faster (and slightly less panicked) evacuation given a real emergency offshore.
On completion, you receive your BOSIET (basic offshore safety induction and emergency training) certificate, which is required before you are able to board the helicopter to the drill ship. Training does not, however, stop there. Regular safety drills are completed onboard. These tended to happen when I was fast asleep in bed, and made for a rude awakening! The siren would sound and depending on the instructions of the alarm call, you were required to pick up the appropriate safety equipment and check into you designated lifeboat muster point. Alarms will tell you if the emergency is: 1) a simple ship evacuation (lifejackets required); 2) a fire evacuation (fire hood required); 3) a H2S gas evacuation (gas masks required and muster upwind of gas leak); or 4) a pirate invasion! Pirates are still a real threat in certain areas, and if there was to be a threat workers needed to quickly make their way to the lowermost part of the ship (under the waterline). The doors would automatically close and lock, and would not open again until help came! I’m pretty glad there was a low pirate threat in the area I was working…
Overall, it was a great experience to work in such extreme conditions. There was a great sense of community onboard and some great characters! It is impressive to see the risk and the cost of getting oil and gas out the ground and into our cars and plastics. The whole experience has encouraged me to be more economical about my energy and plastic usage, and confirmed to me that I never ever want to get in a helicopter again!
-- Happy Exploring --
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