5/3 – Well engineering and football

Today we learn about well engineering. This course is taught by Adnan Ali, and he’s quite a character. A very experienced engineer with a mind of his own, Adnan is also Shell’s version of Johan Cruyff. He lectured for most of the day, mostly using sound effects to spice up his material, and I’ve taken the liberty of writing down some of his remarks. They had us in stitches.

‘Our job is to make hole in the ground.’

‘I usally only do about 1000 feet. Why? Because I is boss.’

‘It’s cheaper to drill in Malaysia then in, say, Holland. In Holland, you pay one euro for a cup of coffee. In Malaysia, you get a barrel of coffee for that.’

‘For derricks they used wood. Until they used all the wood, then they used metal.’

[on directional drilling] ‘We must maximize our sucking.’

‘Without a well to confirm it all this dreaming of geologists is just a dream.’

‘The connection from the rig to the platform was called the widowmaker. Now it is called the access ramp.’

[student] ‘Could you please write a bit bigger?’ ‘I’m trying to save paper.’

‘We need a mechanic because everything on the rig is mechanical.’

‘This is the drill manager. He reports to you, hahahaha!!!’

[question from student] ‘Why do you only go to about 500 feet?’ ‘500 feet is quite a bit, lady!’

‘This man works on what we call the monkey board.’ [student] ‘Is he the monkey man?’ ‘He is, unfortunately, called the derrick man.’

[on a blow-out resulting in a rig on fire] ‘Is no problem on a land rig. You just run away. On an off-shore rig…’

‘If the well is out of control, gas will shoot out and burn your house down.’

Needless to say, we had fun.

After Ahnad we had a short lecture on drill logging by Ru, followed by a small exercise. We had to calculate the recoverable volume of a reservoir. It’s a preparation for our project later this week.

During the break I’d made a proposal to play football at night. One of the local guys picked up on this, and made arrangements at an indoor venue. A lot of people were interested, and he played for about 90 minutes with almost two thirds of the group, including a lot of the girls. It was great fun, but I was exhausted afterwards. Back at the hotel we had some noodles around the corner, a light meal, but more than enough. Price for dinner including drinks: 4 Ringitt, about a euro…