A new day, a new place, a new well...

Okay, so I guess this is Day 4 on Phelps 5 for me. I spent the last couple days witnessing one of the coolest things I've ever seen...a rig move. I'm guessing most of you haven't been out to see a drilling rig yet and the few that have probably haven't seen one move. These things are huge. 120 feet tall, don't know now many tonnes. I didn't think it could be done but now I'm a believer.

The first step is to clean up the floor and shacks and put all the drill pipe in the pipe tubs. Next they lay down the derrick. This is one of the most impressive parts of the move. About halfway down the lateral forces really start pushing on the pins and it really starts to creak and groan...loud. A couple times it will bind and slip suddenly. I was sure it was going to fall the rest of the way. This was all done at night.

The next morning the movers showed up and started pulling the shacks away from the main substructure. Those were just left on the side of the lease since the substructure needs to go first to the next site. Moving that is the other impressive part. They first have to pull the draw works (the huge winch, blue part) off the top. They do that by putting a giant ramp beside the substructure (5 meters high) and then backing one of their huge moving trucks up it. After that they use a smaller ramp to lift the top part of the substructure (dark grey part). I may be getting into too much detail but these pieces are massive. Hopefully the picture shoes it well.

Once everything is apart they start moving it all down the road to the next site. They put down some plasic and the wood mats around the conductor (first part of the well drilled about 20 meters into the ground before the rig gets there) before centering the substructure over the well. Once that is done the whole process happens again in reverse.

They raised the derrick today. A very cool site that I was able to share with some friends. Being the nerd that I am I pointed the webcam on my laptop out the window of my shack at the rig. Even nerdier, the view was too bright for the camera and everthing appeared white...until I balance my sunglasses on top of the computer over the lens to cut down the light...it worked perfectly. So a few friends that were online at the time got to watch the derrick being raised on MSN Messenger. I was outside to watch it, take a few pictures, and turn around to look back at the camera. I may offer a couple more viewings this week if anything else interesting happens.

Hope the rest of you are having a good week. Send me some comments so I don't get too lonely out here.