"In most jobs, the professional actually sees what he’s working on. The carpenter sees the nail he’s hitting, the truck driver sees the road ahead, and the doctor sees the spleen he’s venting, but as drillers, we have it a little harder."
"From the smallest house well jobs, to the most technically challenging deep water oil wells, attention to detail has made the difference between success and failure."
Years ago, when I started in the drilling business, training of new hands was almost non-existent. Drillers expected new hands to know what to do and how to do it without any instruction – almost as if they were supposed to be born with the knowledge of how to make the tongs bite or slip the drill line.
The
blowout, fire and sinking of the rig Deepwater Horizon, and the tragic loss of
11 of our peers in the drilling industry, will be with us much longer than it
takes to clean up the environmental mess.
In
addition to the shale gas that is starting to take off, there is another source
of gas in the United States that is underutilized – coalbed methane.
"Often,
we don’t get to pick the locations we drill on or the formations we may
encounter. The customer hires us to be able to drill any formation, anywhere,
so we’ve got to be prepared ..."
