always wanting mo fo the money

Halliburton and Beyond

my old dog bud in a water well drilling rig. he was ready to go

       Somehow I ended up stuck on a cement crew while working for Halliburton and that meant you were never home. I was constantly working, racking up all kinds of hours travelling to well sites all over Ohio. One might think this is good, but somewhere along the line the oil service companies had a rule, that basically the more you worked the less you were paid. While all the time thinking this is an incentive for the worker to get his job done and get back to the house. All perfectly legal back then and I suppose is still in effect, but the problem with that is, that company who needed your services would call you out early and  you would arrive on the job site where a well was just drilled in and there was a problem with the drilling rig. One night the whole drilling crew walked off. How do you plan for that? It wasn’t always the employee’s fault; instead just the nature of the business but it was the employee who would suffer as a result of that event.

         The oil field is usually made of teams of people overseen by the drilling boss who ushers in one crew and sends another home as the need for different services are realized.   Surveyors may lay the site out based on geological evidence that assures the well owners, that maybe this will be a gusher. Not all are, and some of that depends on the management of the well from the beginning to the end. Shortcut any part of the operation and you could own a flaming derrick such as the one that blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, I believe it was BP Horizon rig and it caused one the worse oil spills in history.

         The drilling crew stays with the rig and is usually on a 12 on, 12 off shift. These guys set the drilling rig up on a pad, and then they rig up and drill the hole in, and usually are on sight to do whatever needs to be done with the drilling rig in general. You have a surface cement crew who basically make sure the large surface bore string of pipe is cemented properly to assure groundwater supplies are protected. You have a logging and perforating crew, whose job is to figure out where the oil is and how much there is of yet. They do this by various testing methods and correlating the information based on the elevation from the top of the well head. Sometimes repeat procedures in the cementing and logging as well as perforating the different rock strata may occur, to correlate and assure that the well has its oil producing zones zeroed in just right.

    After the well is drilled and the pipes have been perforated, or holes blown through them with dynamite in the area where the oil is determined to be, as this could have been done in the bottom of the hole almost a mile down or wherever it was determined that the oil lay in the rock strata below your feet. Then the fracking crew comes in and fracks or fractures the rock by using extreme pressure and lots of water and sand to create channels for the oil to return to the pipe almost a mile down or more under our feet. Even more operations such as installing pump equipment, separators and heaters to make the oil flow better are also incorporated into the scheme of things.

          Since I have worked in the oilfields years ago, the principle is the same but the methods are different now, as the drilling rigs are bigger, and the wells are deeper and are horizontally drilled and sent out to six different locations from the same rig placement, these are kind of spread out from a central location.  There isn’t as many oil well sites but the combined surface area of the producing zone of oil and gas of each well is increased up to 600 percent more than the conventional wells we used to drill. It is a highly technical operation as it was back when we were doing it also. But the wells are more complicated, with an oil well that may be producing out of several levels of gas and oil in the same bore hole. The wells cost a lot more now than they used to, into the millions of dollars. The EPA in an effort to protect groundwater with environmental safeguards, force drilling companies and oil fields producers to install environmental protection safeguards such as lined ponds, which also make drilling sites more expensive. They also require about ten to 100 times more fresh water to frack the same well, as it did when I was doing it in 1977. Fuel costs are higher; roads have to be built as well as infrastructure in terms of gas lines and such to handle the increased volume of fluids and gas to take it to the refiner, or to the end user to heat our homes etc.. One crew leaves another comes on and they drill for a while then it could be the same crew back, in the meantime the drilling crew is still doing their 12 on 12 off 7 days a week. Drillers always made good money but were subjected to a lot more safety issues.

     In regards to the oil well producer, time is money and they have called you out in anticipation of bringing the well in or in the process of completing a drilled well, and you usually get there before you are needed like around 4 in the morning. And get to spend some quality time hanging out in your truck, trying to catch a nap sitting in the seat with your head propped up in corner of the cab with the engine running to stay warm while waiting your turn at the drill floor to get your job done so you can head back home. We carried a wide board you would place between your seat and the passenger seat to form a bed when needed. Some carried sleeping bags with them. Some trucks had sleepers and you could climb in the bed and catch some sleep. Now according to the oilfield bosses if you were in a sleeper or waiting to do your job on a well you were not actually driving you deserved less pay for sitting around. My theory on that was like this. If I am in the middle of nowhere on a drilling rig and the only way home is the same company truck that brought me out there, then until I was back at the shop as well the truck was, then I would go off the clock. The service company owners were always trying to save a buck and since the oilfield isn’t union they would push you as far as they could.

     In the meantime you are on 24 hour call and you could be called out anytime in the 12 days on, and if you were real unluckily they would try and steal the other 2 days off you had, and make you work those. You learned real quickly not to answer the phone. Sometimes you would barely be home an hour and next thing you know as you settle down to sleep, the phone would ring and you have to go on another job. The dispatchers were used to being cussed out and told off on regular basis. It was this uncertainty of not knowing when you were going out on a job, and not having any time off that finally made me give up Halliburton. I quit them and within a week was back at work at Schlumberger Well services. It was another oil field service company with a little better time off program, but still even it wasn’t anything to brag about as you rarely were able to have your full 2 days off after working 4 straight.

     They wouldn’t send anybody out to replace you in a truck if you were on a job, instead you would have to wait till you were back at the shop to begin your days off. What good does a pocket full of money do a young guy like me back then, when the only thing you could ever get close to is some hairy, ugly, dirty roughneck? It usually took a day to rest up and that left you one day to maybe go on a date, or get drunk as the case usually was for us back then. We would sit and complain about sitting in the air seat of our truck and hauling butt all over Ohio, but then the first time when we had some time off, the lot of us would grab a seat on the barstool and complain about our jobs, as if that bar seat was half as comfortable as the truck seat. But at least we could finally do as we wanted. It was our choice to sit in bar seats. When you work for the oilfield they own you till you get hurt.

     Then they don’t know you. But that is the way it is with most companies that assume the worker is out to get them. Most workers have accidents and get hurt, and rarely intentionally hurt themselves to receive compensation for their injuries. I know I would rather have a good back and a steady job if I could have.

    I managed to stay healthy all the time I worked in the oil fields and it wasn’t till I was blasting on strip mines did I hurt my back , picking up a box of dynamite. Employer attitudes are changing due to the rights of employees. Still we need to find a level of cooperation with management in establishing the need for the injured worker to resume his duties as fast as he can if possible, and if not help find him other suitable work. This is rarely done, but I think it should be part of the process of reducing our workmen’s compensation claims.

      Anyhow I thought I would include this brief summary of what I experienced while working at various oil field  companies to kind of enlighten you as I recall more tales of my earlier working days in the oilfields. Hope you enjoy.