How Hard Is It To Drill?

Factual Questions
1

From Honest Trailers: Armageddon

“I asked Michael why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers, and he told me to shut the fuck up, so that was the end of that talk.”

“I mean, this is a little bit of a logic stretch, let’s face it. ‘They don’t know jack about drilling’? How hard can it be? Aim the drill at the ground and turn it on.”

–Ben Affleck’s DVD Commentary
So, how difficult is it to ground drill? Could I simple buy a drill setup from someone and pound away? What’s the whole process and its difficulties? Could astronauts realistically learn it in a few days?

2

To drill covers a lot of ground
Sure you could use a hand drill , point it at the ground, hole drilled, probably not what you are thinking though.
It pretty much goes without saying everything on Armageddon was very removed from reality. Reality was a distant cousin which the film was no longer on speaking terms with.

The machine shown on Armageddon ( Bruces super drilling device that NASA couldn’t get to work) was basically a machine used for river crossing, trench drilling stuff, getting cables and pipes under roads rail and rivers.
Nice picture here.
http://napatictlimited.org/uploads/3/5/7/9/3579850/6328171_orig.jpg
They are not complicated things.

They are also not used in oil well drilling. Ever
(A side story Shell once sponsored a project to develop a rack and pinion drive system as seen on those devices, to replace the standard hoisting system to move stuff up and down in a derrick. Shell believed it was the best thing in the world, most of the drilling contractors looked at Shell in much the same way a cat would look at a human)

Mining uses a lot of what are called Shot drilling or blast hole drilling rigs
Nice pic here

These trundle around punching thousands of holes in the ground , dropping some explosive down there and onwards.
Both of these would have been eminently suitable for Bruce and the team. They are simple, heavily automated and good for a few hundred feet. No need for Bruce and the gang to operate those, an astronaut who could operate an on / off switch could master it in a few minutes.

If you want to look at oil well drilling, that started out with hand dug pits and progressed to impact drilling with a cable rig

apparently a 4,000 year old technology that involves poking the ground with a sharp stick, then pulling out the rubble. (There Will Be Blood was surprisingly not completely terrible when it came to showing the technology, not 100% , but not awful, compared to any other movies with drilling in it. Ok it is a pretty low bar)
Colonel Drake brought rotary drilling rigs over from the salt mining industry in the 1850s and essentially the principle hasn’t changes since. Sure they started making them out of metal, and they got bigger, more powerful , heavier loads, better drilling bits, all kinds of wonderous devices that steer the well and measure the rock etc. Really it is a hoist that lowers drill pipe into the ground with a drill bit at the end, you pump fluid down the pipe, rotate the pipe and it brings the cuttings up the annulus and maintains a hydrostatic head.

So what does the driller do? Well if you want to have some fun, go tell one he is really just a glorified crane operator , in fact a crane operator has to deal in 3 dimensions, a driller just has to move the hoist up and down, he has it easy. The driller moves the blocks up and down which applies the weight to the drill bit, turns on and off the rotary speed , turns the pump rate up and down but does all of that in response to the various feed backs he is seeing in terms of weight variations, torque and pump pressure. He is also managing the drill floor crew, which is a full time job, and keeping an eye on pit volumes, watching out for kicks (well they should be) and a myriad of other tasks all associated with keeping the hole getting deeper, or cased or completed. If it were a building site the driller would be the general contractor foreman, there would also be a bunch of general contractor workers (the rig crew) and sub contractors there as well. (The drilling process still involves far too many hands on dials and levers, fortunately automation is finally making ground into the drillers cabin)
Behind him there are a group of rig engineers and rig managers dealing with the drilling rig itself. Then there are drilling and completion engineers planning designing, dealing with logistics the rig contractor and sub contractors. The drilling and completion engineers are basically the architects and building engineers who work for the operator ( the SHELL, EXXON etc)
Finally behind them are the reservoir engineers , Geology and Geophysics and the whole sub surface asset team. They are basically the client who will have epic models of the reservoir and say “ I need a hole through this bit of rock 20,000 feet down , it needs to be at this angle, this length and this diameter with this completion design. The drilling and completions engineers then try and figure out how to get from surface to there, maintaining those parameters at the bottom of the well. Operational geologists , petrophysicsts and other pebble oriented people will help out along the way to identify the formations you are in, work out how far to the reservoir or if you are in the right bit of the reservoir.

So could an astronaut do any of that?
If it is the blast hole / tunnel crossing stuff – sure , and that’s basically what they were doing in the film. Switch on or off.
From an oil well drilling perspective, anything at the rig site – sure ( I have absolutely no idea what Bruce and company were doing at their rig, it bore no resemblance to any drilling operation in the history of ever) . Most things at the rig site would be relatively easily to pick up, or it should have been automated, or if it relies on ‘experience’ then it is probably a task that is really badly documented or analysed, the drilling industry has a long way to go in process control and automation. The one area that some detailed training would be at the well site geologist level, but that is no biggie for astronauts, the whole Apollo group spent extensive time being trained as geologists.
In the drilling completion engineering world, going to be trickier, not undoable, pretty much everyone there is a degreed or masters, and there is often a lot of specialist on speed dial. Caveat if you are in shale factory drilling , or general US land drilling , the drilling program is pretty much “ same as the last well” so you may have one engineer dealing with multiple rigs, rather than multiple engineers dealing with one rig. Either way, An astronaut should have no issues.
Into the subsurface world you start to keep tripping over pHd folks, and whilst astronuts often have pHd, I think it is going to be a stretch to get them up to speed with all of that and al the other stuff.
Could you find anyone to do it top to bottom. Probably not

Could you go and rent a drilling rig and operate it. No easier than any large complex piece multi million dollar piece of industrial equipment ( land rig 30-40 million, deepwater drillship 500-700 million)
If you can figured that out, then you could drill a hole. Where it went and why is a whole other story.

Hope that helps shed some light on the complexities and simplicities of it all.
PCM
(20 years LWD engineer, directional driller, drilling engineer, rig engineer , general oil patch layabout who used to be a physicist)

3

You said “annulus” Hee Hee!
Thank you for the excellent write-up. “Pebble oriented”, I loved that.

4

Did that answer your question, Jormungandr?

5

Come on, this is the Dope. Can’t we get a real astronaut to answer?

6

Nice, Precambrianmollusc.

lieu
2 years roughneck; floor, pits, derricks, 35 years exploration geologist

7

Dude - do you even drill?
:slight_smile:

8

Besides the non science aspects of the show like using shuttles to get there and ignoring the near zero gravity environment they would actually be working in the premise of the show IMO does make sense.

Its hard to be chosen to be an astronaut. Its not nearly as hard to be one.

While the premise of crazy assed redneck drillers is over the top, I think the idea of training drillers to be astronauts makes more sense than training astronauts to be drillers.

Every job has theoretical aspects and real world aspects. The latter you typically learn by doing. Most hand on jobs do have a certain art and craft to them. And a person that has years of experience doing it and is recognized as good at it is IMO going to beat the pants off some fly boy genius regardless of how much training he has.

Remember the astronauts job was to get them there and keep them alive. The drillers job was to drill. Makes perfect sense to me.

Now one could argue that the drilling environment was so alien to their real world experience that their biases due to such experience would put them at a disadvantage over some astronaut team that learned the theory and nuts and bolts operation of drilling rig but had little actual experience.

9

Actually, the logical solution is to make up a crew that’s half astronauts and half drillers. Then, no matter what knowledge is needed in a given situation, you’re covered.

10

But don’t forget your spare Russian!

11

The drilling platform requires a special team. Drilling down is easy. Coming out, to change a bit, ect, requires roughnecks. I think astronauts would be wimps.

12

Working in zero gee deep space requires not being claustrophobic, knowing the physics of how things move in zero gee, how to use tools when there’s nothing to react against, how to manage work effort so as not to fog up your helmet, and most importantly having resistance to motion sickness so as to not upchuck in your helmet.

I think roughnecks would be useless, if not dead.

13

Truly awesome and educational write-up. Thank you.

Which as a total know-nothing I followed all the way up until you said “LWD engineer” without defining your acronym.

That would be?

14

Long Wide “Drill”

15

There is nothing really special about the drill crew, on a fully manual rig they do need experience , because they are using fairly outdated equipment and processes and the drill floor is a bit of a ballet of manually moving parts, the experience part helps you not loose fingers or get clobbered by someone moving a chain tong into you when you were not supposed to be there.
Stamina helps, astronauts I would think are generally fit, and Bruce wasn’t wet tripping 25,000 feet of pipe on a damp north sea evening.

Just to give an idea of the level of automation that is coming to the drill floor have a look at this video from about 1:40 in

They narration is a bit annoyingly "ra ra its all wonderful" but it shows a semi automated trip out of hole, the only person you see on the drill floor is stood next to a bucket and mop at 2 minutes. The newer control systems are now to the point the drill hits a 'trip out switch" and the system will pull stands, the driller is there to monitor the important stuff and intervene if required, not focused on pulling levers and switches or which arcane sequence of switches to throw.

So if it is that simple , what’s all the cost and complexity about, that is probably another really long post, heavily centered on uncertainty. All the those drilling and completion engineers and Lieu like people are all pretty busy , and the rig crew have to handle all the variations and fairly detailed processes that are needed to deal with uncertainty.

NASA really should have hired some blast hole drillers. The machinery is much closer, the process of drilling a hole in an asteroid would have been similar (no fluids circulating) and Michael Bay could have made much more of the following when were introduced to the rig crew, rather than a silly chase around some rusting pipe work

flames and explosions soon after the 20 second mark
16

Thanks for the kind words, probably one of the few lucid posts I have managed on the dope.

LSLGuy LWD Engineer is Logging While Drilling Engineer
Basically companies like Schlumberger, Halliburton make equipment that looks like a 30ft long tube packed with electronics that makes a bunch of measurements of the rock and drilling mechanics. The equipment sits just behind the drill bit and makes measurements down hole. They send radio waves through the rock, sound wave, bounce neutrons and gamma rays of the rock and can take fluid samples of the rock and make images of the rock. This information is recorded in the tool and also a subset of it is transmitted up hole to surface through what is known as Mud pulse telemetry. The LWD Engineer is responsible for the tool preparation and operations, you monitor the data as it is sent to surface then extract the memory date when the tools are brought back to surface and make some preliminary interpretations of that data before handing it onto the geologist and petro physicist who really know what to do with it all. Schlumberger, Halliburton recruit people fresh out of university with eng/science degrees or masters , throws them through a training program then dispatches them to the rig forever. That’s how I ended up in the O&G industry, kind of a fun job.

17

Apparently a lot has changed. Last time I worked on a platform was 35 years ago. It wasn’t for lightweights back then.

18

Didn’t mean to rag on drill crews of old, and it certainly was pretty tough, dangerous work, apologies if it came off that way. The point was really that the astronauts wouldn’t have to deal with those conditions. Thankfully some things have advanced and life on a drillfloor, at least on a modern rig, is significantly safer than it used to be, although it will be a long while before that percolates throughout the global drilling world.

19

Not to mention there’s likely a difference between the intuitive knowledge and experience from running a drill rig at 1G and 1 atmosphere vs that needed for a drill rig in microgravity and vacuum. In fact, my guess is that training the astronauts would be easy compared to building a drill rig that won’t vacuum-weld itself together in the wrong place (or pop apart due to expansion and contraction going from sunlight to shadow, or some other issue).

20

Absolutely! Thank you for the succinct yet incredibly informative answer, Precambrianmollusc.