|
Blair Wondzell retires from AOGCC In 40 years working in Alaska’s oil patch, he’s been at Swanson River, on trans-Alaska pipeline construction and seen North Slope field development Kristen Nelson PNA News Editor
In 40 years in the Alaska oil patch, Blair Wondzell has been on the front lines of the Alaska oil and gas industry: Cook Inlet development; North Slope exploration; construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline; North Slope field development.
Wondzell, who is retiring from the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission as senior petroleum engineer, has been with the commission since 1978. He’s been with the state, mostly in oil-related agencies, since the early 1970s. After graduation from the University of Fairbanks he worked for Standard Oil Company of California — now Chevron.
But oil and gas wasn’t his original plan.
Wondzell moved to Alaska in 1951, “long before Swanson River,” he told PNA in a November interview.
The 1961 UAF graduate got into the oil and gas business when Standard Oil Company of California was developing the Swanson River oil field.
“They didn’t have any petroleum engineers that wanted to come to Alaska,” he said. Chevron recruited Wondzell, whose degree was in mining engineering, and sent him to Huntington Beach, Calif., to go through their engineer training.
As an engineering trainee, he spent time with field crews at Huntington Beach. The first chance he had to come back to Alaska was in 1966, and he worked for Standard of California in Cook Inlet and at exploratory wells on the North Slope.
Wondzell worked as a rig foreman and production foreman at Swanson River and as a drilling engineer and formation evaluation testing engineer on North Slope exploratory wells.
“For about 10 months in ‘72,” he said, “I ran the Swanson River field as production foreman. … I was so busy … about every three or four weeks my wife and kids would come down.” Wondzell had a little camp trailer that he’d pull outside the field and they would camp out.
While he spent some time as a testing engineer on North Slope exploration wells, Wondzell said the most interesting thing about the early days on the North Slope was circling the Manhattan when the tanker made its test run to Alaska. “You know, you’d been reading about it for months or maybe a year and all of a sudden — it’s clear across the continent from us — and all of a sudden I had a chance to go see it.” Jobs hard to find Wondzell said that when he was laid off in the big layoffs of 1972 jobs were pretty hard to find in Alaska. He went to work for the Alaska Division of Aviation as a project engineer. While there, he took an Arctic engineering course, and after hearing the instructor talk about all the things they were learning building the trans-Alaska pipeline, Wondzell said he decided that he would rather learn first hand.
He took a job as field surveillance officer with the state pipeline coordinator’s office in 1975. In 1977 he went to work for the minerals and energy management group in the Department of Natural Resources — now the Division of Oil and Gas.
Wondzell has been a registered petroleum engineer since 1972. In those days, he said, there were so few registered engineers in the state it was hard to find three to act as references for his application.
Joined commission in 1978 Wondzell came to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission as a petroleum engineer in 1978, after Prudhoe Bay production had begun, but before the startup at Kuparuk.
“That’s got to be one of the best petroleum engineering jobs ever,” Wondzell said. “There were so many things to do. Never bored. Two days are never the same. Problems are always different.”
In the early 1990s, Wondzell took over the inspection group. “When I took over … there were absolutely no goals or performance standards or anything else.” Goals were put together and the inspection group started turning out annual reports, setting out the goals for the year and evaluating how close we get to them.
The inspectors are the commission’s main oilfield contact, Wondzell said. The inspectors do blowout preventer tests, safety valve testing and “they witness the accuracy and calibration of the oil and gas meters that are used for custody transfers. The meters are the basis for the state’s royalty and severance tax.”
The goal for witnessing meter tests is once a quarter in Cook Inlet.
“Pump Station 1, it’s every month, simply because there’s so much more volume going through those.”
Prior to the 1990s, Wondzell said, meter tests were included in “other work” and the inspectors weren’t trained in it. Now inspectors are sent to metering school at the University of Texas extension school.
The commission’s inspectors are not trying to determine the correct volume, “we’re trying to confirm that the company’s volume is probably correct.”
At the rigs, inspectors witness blowout preventer tests. “We try to do all of the exploratory rigs on their first BOP test on the well and then about every month thereafter. And development wells we try to witness a test on those about every month and a half.” Intelligent, independent evaluation The commission’s inspectors don’t just witness specific equipment tests, Wondzell said.
“The first time I sent an inspector out to the platforms after I was supervisor, the people at the platform called me and thanked me for sending somebody out there to make an intelligent, knowledgeable and independent look at the safety systems on the platform.
“So after that, I just put together a schedule and we would go to every platform at least twice a year, once in each half.”
In addition to metering school, Wondzell said, all of the inspectors go to well control school if they haven’t already had that training. It’s “really hard to hire good inspectors,” he said, “because we can really only use the real good ones — can’t have someone out there who’s either over or under zealous… (and) need people with rig experience.”
There are one, sometimes two, inspectors on the North Slope at a time. The commission’s presence is continuous, Wondzell said, except for three or four inspector meetings a year and Thanksgiving and Christmas.
And in the past, “we would send inspectors out to catch individual BOP tests… They would be gone one, two or maybe three days. They’d go and do assigned work and come back.”
Today, however, inspectors to the slope for eight days, including travel time, Wondzell said.
Another thing that has changed is that inspectors used to have to find a place to sleep and eat. Now, he said, the commission has permanent offices and rooms on the slope, dedicated rooms at the NANA camp.
The commission has two trucks and safety equipment on the North Slope — including powerful truck-mounted cell phones. For inlet travel, the commission purchased and maintains the best survival suits available for the inspectors.
And the goal of the inspection program isn’t publicity for the commission, Wondzell said, but identifying and correcting problems.
“We’re more concerned about having good cooperation than we are about making good press for the commission,” Wondzell said.
| 