Category: bbcp

So yes. It’s been a busy month and a half. For a good portion of December I was in the UK for the annual Christmas trip. So that was all fun.

But January was geology business through and through. For three days I was in Houston for a conference that Exxon held for grant recipients and international scholars, and that was a surprisingly fun time. I got to hang out with one of the other grad students from CU a little – Aya, who is from Lebanon – and she introduced me to all of the other international scholars from the middle east. It was fantastic to get to talk with all of them. I also had a poster at the conference (it was pretty and contained no actual data!) and Exxon conducted a short course for us all as well.

The short course was kind of an interesting experience, since a lot of it focused on very basic petroleum reservoir concepts. It was a good reminder that many geologists really don’t encounter that kind of thing until after they’re done with grad school, if ever. And also a reminder to me that I’m still total crap at seismic interpretation.

A day after the Exxon conference, I flew to Bremen, Germany, because it was time to process all of the core (921 meters of it!) that we drilled in the Bighorn Basin last summer. It was a lot of hard work. We mostly did 10-11 hour days with only a lunch break, which was normally less than an hour – and we didn’t get weekends. We were a 7 days a week operation.

I was the little cog in the process that did some general core description of each newly split core. It was definitely a new experience for me – I’ve done core description before, but never in that kind of situation. New cores were constantly coming in, so basically I had only 10-15 minutes with a core at most (normally less). The emphasis was on breaking the cores down into units that could be given a description with the important major features highlighted. There weren’t a lot of places where I had a chance to pinpoint specific features.

So that was tough, and stressful. These cores were also a lot of mudstone, and a lot of paleosols. There were very few sharp contacts. Almost everything, from color to lithology, changed gradationally, and that made picking where to draw the line very difficult. There were also a lot of drab intervals that just made me crazy, because they were on this weird border between being sandy siltstone and silty sandstone and I just had to pick one with a very limited amount of inspection time.

But the cool part of my job was that I got to see almost every centimeter of those cores (except for the few that would get done while I was at lunch) and I saw some really, really cool stuff! There are some pictures of the most fantastic things linked below. But overall, it was a really cool experience, and it has confirmed for me that I really would enjoy that as a job. With the caveat that normal work days and weekends would be necessary.

With all the core split, now we’re into the next phase of the project, which is going to be the real meat. Half of the core (the working half – I described the archive half) was extensively sampled for the various scientists in the project. Mary and I will be getting our samples soon, so we’ll be able to start looking at grain size. Extremely high resolution image scans of the core were done as well (along with color analysis that should be way better than me frowning at the Munsell color chart and bitching that none of them look right) so I think I’ll be looking at those in more detail, and then I have a feeling it’s back to Adobe Illustrator and I’ll be spending more weeks of my life drawing lots of little boxes. I’m excited to meet with Mary on Wednesday to see what direction I should be headed in next. And soon I should finally have a thesis topic hammered down! Which is exciting, and scary.

Anyway, here’s the pictures, enjoy! We ended up working so hard and so fast that we had three days off during the course of the trip, and were able to use those days to do actual tourist-type things. So there are a lot of pictures of Bremen as well. I had a lot of fun, and I already miss all of the other people from the work group. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in the near future, maybe at AGU!

Pictures

Pictures of Bremen
Pictures from our day trip to Bremerhaven
Pictures from work time at Marum – lots of pretty rocks.
Video of a ship leaving the docks at Bremerhaven because this was the first time I’d actually seen something like this up close and thought it was insanely cool.
Video of the adorable puffer fish at the Klimathaus in Bremerhaven
Here, listen to the horrible noise the reefer door at Marum made every single time it was opened, though after a while you just stop hearing it.
Video of a core being split which takes a long time, but it was near the start of work so Will and Rike weren’t that fast at it.

Here’s my Picasa album of all the pictures I took at Gilmore Hill: Gilmore Hill Drilling

And a few videos:
Core water cannon
Breaking pipes at sunset
Lowering the mast
Moving the rig to the new location

As of right now, drilling is finished! We turned the B-hole (not to be confused with the Gilmore Hill A-hole) over to the day shift with less than fifty feet left to drill, and they got that done in a bit over an hour. So Gilmore Hill is finished, and that was our third and final site! So now it’s just about analyzing what little initial data we have, and biding our time until January, when we all get to meet up in Bremen and do another marathon of SCIENCE!

Will ended up deciding to go deep on the first whole, so on night six that’s what we did. The returns took a lot longer, and we had a lot of down time during the night shift because the drill bit had been worn almost entirely smooth. That required tripping out of the hole and back in, so that was like two hours gone. After that, we drilled at a reasonable pace, but by the end it was taking 20 minutes per core and there were some really clay-rich intervals that took forever (relatively speaking) to drill through. There was still a hundred and some feet left on the first hole when we handed it over to day shift in the morning, and they finished it up.

However, that night we did have some entertainment. Some of it was not so fun, like the part where I got bitten seven times by various mosquitoes. The most exciting part of the night was when a bat flew through the open door of the RV and couldn’t find its way back out. It eventually flew into the cabinets and hid. The poor thing looked so scared. Gabe ended up using a dish towel to grab it, then let the bat go outside. It flew away alright, so hopefully it was fine and caught a lot more bugs that night!

This last shift we started off just waiting for the first hole to get logged, then we moved the rig to the new location, a whole fifteen feet away from the first hole. When we finally did start drilling, it was just gogogo like the first night. Except since we weren’t doing sampling on this second core, it felt a lot less hectic because we effectively had at least one extra set of hands at all times. So even though we were getting core every ten minutes, I think poor Gabe was getting a little bored at times. AJ seemed determined to get through all 200 feet on his own – we’re not sure if this was because Doug spent like half an hour at the start of the shift telling him it just couldn’t be done, or because he and Brandon were just convinced that if they didn’t see the thing through to the end themselves, they’d somehow get suckered in to one more night shift. But in the end, we had to call it good at about 150 feet since the rig needed to be refueled.

But it’s done for sure now! And day shift has to clean up the drilling site HAHAHA. We went and got breakfast, and now I’m going to try to have a short little sleep and be up by around 1 or so. Our plan is to go hang out in Cody for a couple of hours, and then have a big dinner for all the Gilmore Hill crew. This will hopefully help me get back onto normal hours. And then I’ll be heading home early tomorrow morning, so I will be back in Denver before the weekend!

The previous shift was so ridiculously busy that you’ll notice I didn’t even post about it until tonight. Because it was GOGOGOGO and then I sort of fell into bed and passed out for seven hours.

We’re at Gilmore Hill now, which is our third and final site. In good news, it’s a lot less windy than Polecat Bench, which I’m a fan of. And while we no longer have the most scenic portapotty in Wyoming, it’s also not a wobbly hellbooth on the edge of a very steep drop, so I’m counting that as a win too. In more challenging news, we’re on BLM land that’s a preserve for wild mustangs. Which means that we have to keep everything in a 50 by 50 foot pad of land that’s marked by little pink flags. So everything is very cramped together. And BLM has been by to check multiple times to make sure we’re not leaving our box, so trust me, we’re being very good about staying in the allowed area. This means the portapotty is right next to the RV, which could get unpleasant a few days into the project. It also means that the noise from the drill is pretty crazy at times since we’re really close to it.

And the area is also absolutely beautiful. check my Twitter feed for many pictures. The great thing about being on nights (aside from the impossibility of getting a sunburn and the lack of heat) is that we get both the sunrise and the sunset every day, while day shift gets only OMGSOHOT AHAHAHAHA.

Last night, we didn’t really get to enjoy the picturesque location. As soon as AJ and Brandon (our driller and his assistant) were on site, it was gogogo all nigh. Day shift had only drilled for a couple of hours, so we were rocketing through the shallowest part of the hole, with only a short break so AJ could eat a salad for his lunch. We processed well over 200 feet of core last night, which is a new record for the project. Pretty much as soon as we had one core packaged and logged, we’d have another one waiting. As you can see, we literally filled the rack and had to start double stacking.

So yeah, by the time day shift came to relieve us, we were all ready to drop. And unfortunately, Gilmore Hill is further from Greybull than Polecat Bench was from Powell, so we get a bit less sleep due to the longer drive. Plus night shift is borrowing Dr. Gingerich’s old blazer. I get so motion sick in that car when it’s on regular roads, it’s not even funny. So it’s a 40 minute hell drive for me, and on the other end I have about an hour where I just can’t even look at food.

Thankfully, at the rate this project is going, I don’t think I’m going to have too many roundtrips in the Vomit Comet. We already hit the original target for the first hole during the day shift. Will Clyde (the man in charge on this shift) decided to just go as deep as we could, so we’ll keep going like we did on Polecat Bench and drill until we’re out of pipe. That’ll probably finish tonight or tomorrow, and then the second hole is going to be a nice shallow one just so we can try to catch ELMO twice.

ELMO is the thing I’m interested in – it was a smaller carbon excursion during the Eocene, and if we get good data I want to see if I can do some comparative work between it and the PETM in this area. (Of course, this is all pie in the sky and we won’t really know what I’m going to do probably until January when we’re finished in Bremen.) We’ve all been nervous about getting ELMO in the cores here, since this is our chance – but there are some big channel sands in the area. And sands, while cool in their own right, won’t have climate data for us like muds do. So I was very tense last night as we were going down to 150 feet, since Will projected ELMO here is 150-200 feet in depth. And when we started the evening, we were in a big sand. Then around 80 feet deep we started getting muds, and that lasted until below 200 feet. So I think we’re good! It’s pretty exciting.

(Also as a note, ELMO is what we’re at Gilmore Hill for. We’re not going to get the PETM at all here, since drilling to that depth would require a bigger rig and a lot more time in funds, since it’s so deep.)

So that was our day yesterday. This shift is turning out to be much more relaxed already…

I have been remiss – I posted all of these on twitter, but never collected them in to a blog post. Also, some additional pictures, and even some from Basin Substation, the site I wasn’t involved with. So:

Pictures
My Polecat Bench photo album
Elizabeth’s night 1 pictures
Elizabeth’s Basin Substation day 1 pictures – She worked a 24 hour day on the first day. Crazy!
Elizabeth’s Basin Substation pictures July 15-18
From the BBCP Facebook page

Video
Coffee sloshing in the pot in the RV, just to show how freaking windy it got
Bringing up core at Polecat Bench – what happens every core barrel. Video super noisy due to drilling rig and wind.
The last core at Polecat Bench – you can really hear how darn noisy the rig is on this video…

My fears of interrupted and awful sleep yesterday were unfounded it seems. The people at Americas Best Value Inn actually let us check in immediately, at 9 in the morning, and we were all able to get a good night (day) of sleep. Woot!

And then tonight was a short shift, as shifts go. When we got to the site we were down to our last three sections of drill pipe, which basically meant at most an additional 24 feet of core (I think that’s right) could be drilled. So that went fast. I took a little video of the last Polecat Bench core being brought up, so that will hopefully end up on youtube sometime soon. Dr. Gingerich came back to the site after dinner just so he could put the last of the core into the truck, which was cool. The site is totally finished, and now we’re all off for at least another week until we start at Gilmore Hill on August 1. And some of us are done with drilling (everyone on the night shift but me, actually :/ ) and we won’t be gathering up again until we meet in Bremen in January.

After we had the last of the core (which was, I’m sad to say, a fairly unexciting mix of gray sandstone and gray mudstone from the Paleocene, no final red bed for Dr. Gingerich) buttoned down, the rest of the night was all site cleanup. We got everything ready so people can just go up to the Bench in the morning and haul all the trailers out.

It’ll be fun to be the experienced hand at Gilmore Hill. We also have the same drilling crew for that site, so I’ll be seeing AJ again. He seemed a little nervous about it being mostly new people again now that he’s just gotten us trained up, but at least I’ll be there! Until then, I’m just going to try to get all this mud out of my boots…

Also, just a little progress report from Dr. Will Clyde, on the project in general:

To date we have completed two 450 foot (138 m) cores at Basin Substation, one 425 foot (130 m) core at Polecat Bench, and one 790 ft (240 m) core from Polecat Bench. All of these cores should span the PETM.

Just so you have all the numbers. The 790-footer is the one I was there for most of. :D

It was a busy night, though not as busy as last night. We only did about 25 meters of core, which is a major drop off from last night. This is because the hole is getting deeper, so that means it takes longer to drill, and longer to trip in and out of the hole.

It was also a night where we had a LOT of problems with slipped core. Which was probably partially because of the depth and partially because of the sands and muds we were drilling through. Other than one core that had some red banding in it, it’s been nothing but gray sands and gray-green mudstones. Which makes it really hard to tell where the contacts are through the liner, so that’s been frustrating. We also came across some really neat things in the sands, though – some bits of coal, and we found a fossilized leaf as well, so that was exciting.

The sad news for us night shift people is that it’s been decided we’re going to drill past our intended depth, so we’ll probably have another shift tomorrow night. This wouldn’t be a big deal except no one has a motel room past today, so we’re all having to move to a different motel. In the middle of the day. So that’s going to make sleep rough, which will in turn make work even rougher.

Tonight felt tougher than last night, though, because it was so cold! And windy! And it rained! So we had to race outside around midnight and take all the core on the drying rack and put it in the truck. That was not fun.

But hey, it’s after sunrise, the day crew is here, and it’s time to get some sleep! After Sander makes us a crazy huge bacon and egg breakfast, that is. :)

Anders says: Oh noes they’ve brought up ANOTHER core barrel!!!

In the very brief breaks between cores, Anders and I have been sitting across from each other in the RV with a slowly diminishing block of cheese between us. Because when you’re working around heavy machinery, it can’t be something classic like whiskey – so cheese is the next best thing when it comes to drowning one’s sorrows.

Seriously, yesterday gave me no idea what I was signing up for. We spent most of the night sitting around while logs were run and the location moved. Tonight has been a different story entirely. We’ve been processing core constantly, outside of the drillers’ midnight break. Aaron actually asked them to please take another 30 minutes off because we’re just running ragged.

We’ve brought up 45 meters of core already, and we’ve still got three hours left before day shift takes over. Now that they’ve started using a polymer additive and bentonite in the drilling mud, they’re even cutting through the mudstones fast. (The sandstones, they cut through crazy fast.) Basically, we’ll finish labeling and describing and whatever else the core. I’ll sit down for about two minutes, look at an e-mail, and then there’s that change in the sound of the rig that says they’re pulling up a core barrel, which takes about 3-4 minutes to run up. Then we do it all over again. And I swear the cores are getting heavier and heavier as we go through the night.

The downside of the polymer and bentonite is that it makes the cores harder to handle. The polymer is extremely slippery, and the bentonite tends to make everything more or less mud colored. The polymer stuff reminds me a lot of the “animal birthing agent” that was featured in the episode of Mythbusters where they try to slip on a banana peel. Now consider how awesome it is to pick up a core liner and have that stuff draining out all over your hands. ICK.

We’ve had a couple of big sand bodies. Normally I like sand, but in this case we want as little sand as possible since the paleosols are going to tell us a lot more about the chemistry and other stuff. Lots of gray mudstones, and then we’ve had some really big bright red paleosols, and a little bit of purple and brown. Some of them have huge (3cm in diameter or more) carbonate nodules in them, which is really exciting.

I’m going to sleep really, really well as soon as I get back to the motel.

(Remember: You can follow my adventures as they happen – if you’re up WAY TOO LATE – on Twitter)

My first evening shift has been uneventful so far. Drilling is way ahead of schedule, and they had about 400 and some feet of core drilled on Polecat Bench when the hole started to collapse. So this meant that this evening has pretty much been dealing with the collapsed hole and then moving the rig over to start on the second hole for the site, which we’re hoping we’ll get a full core out of. We’ll be drilling the second hole with polymer additives instead of just straight water, so that ought to keep things more stable.

The funny part is, all the trouble is coming from poorly cemented sand collapsing into the hole. Which was not something that we were all that worried about in planning – everyone was more focused on the abundance of swelling clays. But it’s not something I find particularly surprising, since we had a similar problem with some gas wells when I worked for Noble. Sand can be a bitch.

So I’ve spent most of the evening hunkered down in the RV on site. It’s pretty windy out on the Bench (because gee, it’s a treeless plateau, in the middle of Wyoming) and there’s not really anything much to do until we start getting core out of the second hole. And now that the rig’s been moved, we have to drill through the cap of Quaternary gravel to get to the good stuff that we actually want. Apparently on the first core, the gravel took something like six hours to get through. We’re hoping that it’ll go a little faster with the additives in the water, but we’ll see. It’s a very real possibility that I’ll go through my first shift without seeing any action at all.

This isn’t a surprise, though… everyone already knew that tonight would be uneventful due to the collapsed hole, etc. I just chose to come out to the Bench anyway because the other option was just puttering around in Powell (which rolls up its sidewalks around 9, I hear) or in the lobby of the motel. I’m sharing a room with my advisor, which is great, but she needs to be sleeping while I’m awake, so I couldn’t very well hang out here. So instead I got to meet the other night shift people. We played a game of Dominion, listened to The Book of Mormon, and did some other silly stuff to entertain ourselves. I wish I had some pictures of our beautiful crew, but most of them aren’t looking too lively right now, and I have a policy against taking picture of people who are asleep.

Four hours left to go until shift end. The motor on the rig is going now, which means they’re drilling slowly through the gravel. We’ll see how far we get before it’s time for the day shift to take over.