Better Late than Never

It's way past time to blog about my trip to New Orleans, considering I got there almost a month ago! If I don't write about it now I never will. I've been too lazy to blog lately, especially since I've suddenly got all this free time that I've been using to catch up in my leisure reading. I'll keep this fairly brief, with plenty of pictures.

The reason I went to New Orleans was to attend a week-long "camp" hosted by Shell Oil, where they teach classes on drilling for and producing oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Shell's main offices are in New Orleans, which is why the camp is there. The classes were aimed mostly at engineers; in fact, of the half-dozen schools that sent students (there were about 40 people there total) there were only five geologists, and all came from BYU-Idaho. Aside from me, Dr. Little was there (the only professor, and embarrassingly enough he of course randomly ended up in my group), along with Tyson, Annelise, Clint and Dan Lancaster. We were split up into four groups, which took turns spending a day learning about, drilling, production, supsea operations and safety. Of the four classes, drilling was the most interesting and surprisingly enough safety was the most fun. Here's why safety was so much fun:

What is that, you ask? It's a helicopter crash simulator. We got in, put on our seatbelts, and got dunked under the water and had to escape alive. There were only two in our group that didn't survive the course. (Just kidding, you can see the scuba guys watching from under the water, there was no real danger but it was a lot of fun). They dunked us three times, and the last time they flipped us upside-down, as you can see in the pictures. Unfortunately, our group got to do this the first day, which meant we got the most fun part out of the way too soon. The rest of the safety class was lecture, but the guy teaching did a good job making it interesting. For one thing, I am no longer skeptical about the warnings about entering your car while filling it with gas:

This happens to girls more than guys, because we're less likely to wear staticky sweaters. The girl in the video is lucky her stupid decision to pull the thing out of her car didn't soak her in burning gasoline!

The drilling class was cool because we got to use a simulator for a drilling rig. Sadly I don't have pictures of the simulator, but it was pretty cool. I'm working at one (not on one, though) now, and I know what's going on because of the simulator, which is useful. Basically, the rig lifts up a pipe connected to a motor, with a drill bit at the end, and drills into the ground, like shoving a huge straw into the ground. The pipes on the rig I'm working at are 30ft long. Once the pipe is all the way down, they hold it in place, lift a new pipe and fit it on top of the other one, and continue drilling. It's fun to watch. There's an episode of Dirty Jobs where Mike Rowe works on a drilling rig, but unfortunately it's not on YouTube.

The subsea and production classes were interesting as well, just not quite as interesting. There were some lectures on the big picture of oil production in the Gulf of Mexico as well. The thing that always amazes me is the expense involved, and the risk. The drilling rigs in the Gulf cost anywhere from $750,000 to $1,500,000 every day to operate, and there's no guarantee a hole they drill will produce enough oil to pay off. There is no other industry I can think of with such high expenses, huge risk, and little thanks from the public that depends on their product. There are no Big Oil "obscene profits." Despite what Bill O'Reilly thinks, the Big Oil executives don't conference call every day to decide today's price of a gallon of gasoline. Oil companies have a very small profit margin compared to retail, which typically marks up items as much as 100-200% in some cases. Plus, except for Wal-Mart, retail isn't named the world's biggest villain as often as oil. Just be glad our government doesn't own the oil industry yet, that would be a disaster. But enough politics, more pictures!

This is a set of drill pipe with the drill inside, set down and cut open. That on the bottom is designed to guide the pipe down the hole, then they drill right through it (it's made of clay).

This is one of the machines they set on the ocean floor once a well is drilled. It's basically a whole mess of valves and pipes, and controls the flow of oil from a subsea well.

Close-up of the subsea production unit, the gray metal is called a "sacrificial anode." Since salt water is corrosive, and this machinery is expensive, they place several of these on everything they put underwater. It's made of an alloy that is more reactive than the metal of the machinery, and so attracts the corrosive ions in the water. The result is that the sacrificial anodes corrode first, saving the machinery.

This is a huge plug! Those two plugs on the ground are designed to fit in that huge outlet on the yellow machinery. The various connections allow gas, fluids, electricity and communication to flow to and from the bottom of the ocean to the control center above the surface. Also, they're heavy.

If sand gets into the pipe, it means trouble. They have sound sensors to tell when this happens, but if it gets out of hand this is what happens.

More sand damage, this time not painted over.

They had working production equipment on-site, but filled with water instead of oil. We got to trouble-shoot problems; this is a member of my group opening a big valve.

Another member of my group starting a big pump.

A cut-away of a tank that separates water, oil and gas and sends them to different pipes.

Since most of the people there were engineers, many of them were curious about the geology side of the oil business. None of the people in charge of the event knew much about it, so they set aside time for Annelise, Tyson and I to teach short courses (on the spur of the moment!) about basic geology and seismic interpretation, which was really fun. The highlight of this for me was while I was making a presentation about sequence stratigraphy and how it applies to interpreting seismic profiles (the squiggly lines the engineers give us that we look at and say "drill here"). An engineer asked me if geologists ever disagree in their interpretations, and I replied with the standard joke about if you have three geologists in a room you have five opinions. This didn't sit well with a couple of the engineers, who didn't feel comfortable dividing five opinions by three people, and the guy that asked the question asked why it wasn't six opinions. It really bothered him to not have an evenly divisible number of opinions, to the point that he even changed his facebook status to "wonders why three geologists would have five opinions." It still cracks me up that this was the most difficult point of the lecture. Also, I got a $25 gas card for presenting this, which was extra cool.

After four days of these classes we went as a big group to One Shell Square in New Orleans, Shell's main office there. It was an interesting tour, with a good question and answer session with workers there that left me thinking I wouldn't mind working at Shell as a geologist at all. The big deal for me was the 3D seismic room. This is what I want to do as a career. The room was like a mini-IMAX theater, with lots of computing power, and 3D goggles. I took a picture of the screen, but it's a double-image if you're not wearing the goggles, which you aren't:

The green and white are salt domes under the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico, and the red and yellow lines are wells. The gray in the background is the seismic profile. They make noise at the surface and listen for echoes, like sonar, and come up with that picture. The guy demonstrating could slide back and forth with his mouse and show hundreds of these parallel to each other, which is how they get the 3D picture. And to elaborate on the risk I mentioned earlier, they can't see through the salt because it messes with the sound waves, but they are currently spending $100,000,000 to drill a well around and under this particular salt dome. The engineers are only 90% certain they can even get the well where they want it, and with all the other factors accounted for there's only a 50% chance they'll even get any oil out of this hole. $100,000,000 for a 50% chance of finding oil. You don't do that unless there's major profit opportunity involved. The goggles were super-cool, too:

Sarah and Kristen wearing the goggles (sorry, I don't have a shot of me stylin' like this).

There was also some opportunity to be a tourist. Unfortunately there was too much cloud cover to get a good photo of the Mississippi Delta, but I got a few cool shots from the air approaching New Orleans:

Between layers of cloud.

Looks like someone had an accident.

The main highway runs over a swamp.

Sunset at the airport.

After our tour of Shell's offices, our new friend Sarah, who lived nearby, offered to drive Tyson, Clint and me to down town New Orleans for some sightseeing before our flight home. First we went for some food, and were entertained by some very good music. The lead Trombone player here sang, too, and sounded almost like Louis Armstrong:

We got to stand on the levy while the engineer that drove us there got to be amused by four geologists getting all excited about the river.

The water level here is higher than ground level in downtown New Orleans.

Of course we went to Bourbon Street, which was, I will say, an interesting cultural experience. It really wouldn't be a big tragedy if this place got washed away, it's really not a good place at all. Interesting to see, though.

Voodoo is a big theme at the bars and stores on Bourbon Street.

They had interesting things for sale in the stores. I'm going to make the thumbnails for these pictures very small, so you can't blame me if you're offended by anything.

I wanted to buy a bag of this coffee as a souvenir, but if I did I'd probably end up drinking it:

Some Mardi Gras t-shirts you can't wear on BYU-Idaho campus:

We went into a gem store, because we're geologists, and they had some phallic jade carvings:

Of course there were people on the street trying to get people to come into various buildings "for free," but of course once inside they'll want you to spend lots of money on drinks and women. I didn't take a picture of the other sign on this place, this one was interesting enough. Needless to say, we didn't go in:

Then we went for more food, then on the plane home. It was a very fun trip, and the very best thing about it was all we had to pay was airfare, and food while sightseeing. Everything else, the lodging, the classes, the food, was all paid for by Shell. They didn't even have a guarantee that any of us will ever work for them. This was a major investment in future engineers and geologists with no guaranteed payoff that Shell does every year, because engineers and geologists make lots of money for oil companies, and therefore get paid a lot. This was one of the most fun vacations I've ever had; the only downside was that Kate couldn't come. At least she was able to enjoy the pictures I brought home....