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November 2008

Vol. 13, No. 46 Week of November 16, 2008

40 Years at Prudhoe Bay: Talk far from cheap in early days

Once laid-back geologists wrestled with ways to keep exploration communications secure during, after Prudhoe Bay field discovery

Rose Ragsdale

For Petroleum News

Before the Prudhoe Bay oil field was discovered in 1968, communications on the North Slope was a hit and miss proposition, say geologists who worked on projects there.

“There were no phone links and our only communication with the office was by single side band radio, on an open public frequency — which meant that anyone could listen to what we were saying. Plus, depending upon the sunspot activity, there were times in which radio signals just were not good enough to get a message through,” said C.G. “Gil” Mull, who served as well-site geologist for Humble Oil Co. on the Prudhoe Bay State No. 1 well.

In the beginning, Mull said, security and secrecy was not a particularly high priority.

On the Susie well and during the first months of drilling at Prudhoe Bay, “the drilling reports were sent most of the time in just plain language, although occasionally, we would try to use a simple code system. Each morning we would send, or try to send, to both ARCO and Humble offices the morning drilling report from the company tool pusher, the geological report with sample descriptions from the well site geologists, and something about what the plans were. Because it was a really remote location, and management in town realized that communications were difficult, they generally relied on the expertise of the company tool pusher and well site geologists to run things, and generally figured that no report from the rig meant that things were probably going OK at the drill site and the radio signals were out.

“ They definitely did not try to run things from the office,” he said.

“Sometimes, when we could not get through on the single side band radio, there was a ham radio operator in camp who could raise someone on one of the short-wave frequencies that he operated on. Thus, on some occasions, the offices got collect phone calls from strangers somewhere Outside, from whoever the ham operator could raise, relaying our morning reports,” Mull recalled.

Discovery brings whirlwind

All this changed virtually overnight with the discovery at Prudhoe Bay.

After the first successful drill stem tests when everyone began to realize for certain that it was not going to be a routine well, nothing of any consequence went out over the radio.

From then on, each morning right after breakfast, there was a plane warmed up, and one or another of the well-site geologists hopped aboard the plane to travel to the nearest phone, in either Fairbanks or Barrow, depending on the weather, to phone in the daily drilling and geological reports to the district offices of both ARCO and Humble, and to mail in a hard copy of the reports.

“As a result, I, or one of the other well site geologists, had a daily round trip commute of close to a thousand miles, just to make a couple phone calls and mail two or three letters,” Mull said. “Normally, we would be back to the rig by early afternoon and back to running samples. This was the normal routine, unless something special was going on, such as running wire line logs, cutting cores or testing, in which case the well site geologist would not want to be away from the rig.”

This system continued throughout the drilling of the Sag River No. 1 confirmation well.

Finally, a telephone relay system was set up, and from then on, messages went back and forth by a secure telephone relay system. And, of course with this, the independence of the crews at the well site began to diminish considerably as management in town assumed much greater control of operations, Mull added.

BP taps linguistic diversity

At BP, British geologists borrowed a page from the annals of World War II history and set up a system of code-talking to maintain secure communications to and from its exploration well site.

BP geologist Geoff Larmanie told Crude Dreams author Jack Roderick about the unusual method the British oil company devised to solve the communications conundrum in the earliest days after the Prudhoe Bay oil field discovery.

“As drilling continued throughout the winter, communications security was a problem. People at the well had to communicate with company officials in Anchorage, but without others listening in,” Larmanie said.

“Everyone was sharing these terrible radio frequencies. We had a very good radio man in London who knew the international system … frequencies, the VHF and rural problems, but we didn’t have (Federal Communications Commission) authority to use the frequencies. So, as we were getting closer to the target at Put River No. 1, we were sending information out in sealed bags — airlifted, hand-carried stuff.”

Then BP came up with another way to communicate. Two Welsh-speaking geologists on the company’s exploration team, one based at the drilling rig and the other at the Anchorage office, began to exchange messages in the lyrical speech of their native Wales.

“Welshmen Harvey Jones and Ron Walters conducted a conversation in their native language transferring all the Put River information from the rig to Anchorage,” Larmanie recalled.






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