The Quest for Black Gold – I
It has been some time since I have been doing this. When one meets friends and relatives and new acquaintances and tells him or her what one does for his living: one can almost touch that feeling in the room. You look for oil? You drill for oil? Global warming? Carbon emission? And the job itself? Must be 3D: dirty, dangerous and demeaning, isn’t it? So you are a real blue collar worker?
Yes, I am. And to be honest, proud to be one. I have always liked the virtue whereby a person still remembers the use of his own hands, and knows how to make a living with them. Tilling the land, making machines, repairing a broken down mill, domesticating animals, making fires. Sounds a bit out-dated, doesn’t it, but still it has a huge appeal to me. I don’t know why, maybe because I was brought up and expected to do exactly the opposite. In the communist state I grew up in, the society was divided sharply in two kinds of people: Budhhijibi: ones who made a living with their intellect, and Shramajibi, ones who made a living with toil. My parents belonged to the former, and looked down upon the other. I wanted to be the latter, not as a form of teenage revolt against parenthood, but because there I felt lay the completeness of human existence.
(And well for this my parents are to blame for a certain extent. When I was ten or thereabouts they sent me with a bunch of rock-climbers in the middle of the jungles to learn to “love nature”. That I surely learnt, and also a new perspective of looking at life. )
Coming back to the story I started telling: the life of a oilman is a strange one.
Premises first. Rigs. There are two kinds of rigs: drilling or exploratory rigs and workover rigs. The drilling rigs are the ones where they are drilling for oil for the first time. They need to make sure where lies the oil and extract it. The workover are the ones which were drilled some time back, and are being worked over to extract more or to address some problems in production. Also sometimes my workplace include rigless wells, where the top of the well is just a valve connecting it directly to the production lines ( christmas tree is the name of this valve). My work here is primarily to diagnose the production: how much oil/water/gas is coming from where down in the hole.
Life on a rig is pretty much like the summer camps, if you have ever been to one. There are containers, as we call them, surrounding the well. It is basically a small room on wheels for four, with an attached bath. This is where one stays. Also there are a couple of containers that have been converted to offices. Drilling rigs are normally bigger housing the drilling crews, mudloggers, wireline engineers and anybody concerned with the job. On the other hand workovers are smaller and there are lesser people around. The rig-less ones are the smallest, where you see only a few essential people enough to do the job.
The most interesting thing about this world is that it is continuously moving. Once the drilling or completion of a well is done, the rig moves to the next well. Normally its the same set of people, same equipment, same rig, but a different well. Normally also, a deep bond of friendship develops between guys on the rigs. Same people, same work, cut off from the world, except through television, and doing something which is a little dangerous, meaning one man’s mistake can cost someone else his life.
