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Since I got back to Baku, I have spent all my time on the base preparing for various jobs which I ended up not going on. This has been very annoying but finally I got a chance to go offshore. I have been with the company over 7 months now and this is only my second time offshore; it is a very bad state of affairs.
The fiber deployment job: The job was to pump around 9km of optical fiber into a producing oil well. Essentially you have to feed the fiber into a 1/4" control line which goes all down the well and back up to the top again. Moving fluid drags the fiber through the control lines, in this well water was the carrier. the job took around 6 days, I left on Tuesday and flew back on the following Monday. Too much work, far too little time to relax and watch films!! Stages of the job: Rig up equipment Control lines have to be set up between the pump and the points in the tree where the fiber will be deployed into. Hundreds of feet of control line are needed because it is very difficult to position heavy equipment such as pumps near the actual well. Permanent tubing and valves have to be installed at the tree so that you will have full well control during the deployment in a safe manner. Well control is a serious issue because if the control line is damaged in the well it is possible that a high pressure jet of hydrocarbons could shoot out of the top when you open it up at surface. This would be very bad :-) Cleaning Cleaning the control lines before pumping the fiber is the main part of the job. If the control lines are not free from oil, dirt and sand the fiber can get stuck preventing it from passing around. A couple of the chemicals we used were IPA and Toluene, with over 200 liters of IPA being used. The worst part of this job is the standing around outside keeping an eye on the pump and making sure it is topped up with chemicals and water. There has to be someone at the pump all of the time incase something happens... and they always do :-) Pumping the fiber At this stage the inside of the control line is presumed to be clean inside. The only thing inside should be potable water. A reel of fiber is placed onto a beam which allows water flow from a pump to drag the fiber along. After some hours of pumping the fiber traveled all the way to the bottom of the well and back up to the top, success. After the fiber is in the well, the water used to move the fiber is displaced and replaced by silicon oil; the change of fluid here is because the H+ ions in water can migrate into the fiber and cause it to darken. This darkening will slowly render the fiber useless. Splicing the Fiber to the DTS Now that the fiber is installed it needs to be spliced to surface equipment which is on a different part of the rig. There are lines of surface cable which need to be spliced together before data can be read. This was done and apart from some minor equipment problems everything turned out fine. Rig down This is the more mundane part of the job. You have to tidy up, clean lots of the equipment and then start packing it back into containers so that it can be shipped back onshore. This stage is almost as bad as preparing the equipment before you go offshore. Pictures: These are some pictures I took whilst on the WA platform. To use a camera outside you have to get a permit signed by the Area Authority and someone with Permit Authority. Once outside you have to carry a gas meter at all times, they don't like the idea of electronics and hydrocarbon gas leaks. I dont have many of the job in progress but I have some during the splicing operation and when everything was finished. |