wild well control---canadian style

Well Capping Operation - YouTube




snuffing blowout with home depot extinguisher

Safety BOSS Inc. The Canadian Blowout Company - YouTube

The jury rigging of sheet metal shields on the equipment looks just like a "Red Adair" operation.

At 4:50, the excavator bites off the casing, gas is flowing all around.
I wonder how they kept the diesel engine from running away ?

I didn't see it, was a BOP not used ?

digger doug said:

I didn't see it, was a BOP not used ?

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They said so, but it looked like a very small one, at 3:58.

I think I'm most impressed by the guys using the thermal lance just a few feet from the well.

In the first video, that is a mixture of gas and brine (salt water) and possibly CO2. If you notice, they pretty much snubbed the fire out right after the BOP stack was cut and removed. No dynamite used. Next, they have get down at the well head and remove the stud bolts holding the cut flange on the well head. Once that is done, a quick inspection of the well head flange is done to make sure the ring groove is not damaged. Last, as shown in the film, the new Christmas tree with master valve is installed and pressure shut in. Next, call in the snubbing unit and start pulling all of the junk in the well.

If a bunch of Canadians stood around the fire and said "Sorry" a lot, wouldn't that generate enough carbon dioxide to put out the fire?

Frank R said:

If a bunch of Canadians stood around the fire and said "Sorry" a lot, wouldn't that generate enough carbon dioxide to put out the fire?

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Now that is funny.

The second video is just showing off. IF you know what you are doing then , yes, a 2 lb dry powder extinguisher will knock down that fire. There is a very real danger of reignition from hot objects nearby so the proper way would be water, which would deprive oxygen AND cool the surrounding area.
Red Adair didn't have hydraulic shears on backhoes either. He was a pioneer and had more guts than a slaughterhouse. He was a classic case of guts and intelligence being way better than education.

tdmidget said:

Red Adair didn't have hydraulic shears on backhoes either. He was a pioneer and had more guts than a slaughterhouse. He was a classic case of guts and intelligence being way better than education.

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Tdmidget -

I really have to get my 88 year old uncle down in TX to tell me his stories. Petroleum engineer who worked all over the Mid East from mid 50s until 1990. Family joke always was if he left a country you wanted to clear out because he always left just ahead of some trouble. I remember he told of working with Red and Boots on some job in Iran in the mid/late 50s. He is still sharp as a tack and I need to get some more stories recorded. Comments like yours remind and poke me!

Dale

quasi said:

Now that is funny.

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:-) and pretty clever.............except, as a Canadian I've gotten to meet and talk with a great number of everyday average blue collar Americans when I was pushing a truck for a living. Washington state to Texas and Florida to Michigan. Without question the average Americans are far more polite than Canadians are wrongly accused of being. Anyone who still thinks Canadians are polite? Well you've obviously never been to Montreal. :-)

My late grand dad worked the oil fields of Texas from the 1930's to his end in 1980. He used to tell us of stories where they had "blow outs" while drilling. They didn't call out Red or Boots because they didn't exist back then. They fought blowout on their own. Always kept a box of dynamite in the tool house for emergencies, in case of fire on the well head. The old BOP's they used in those days were manually operated, no hydraulics, no actuators, to assist in closing them. In fact, some of the wells they drilled did not even have BOP's mounted on them!
On the old drilling rigs then, the engines running the draw works and pumps were right there near the well head. The moment a engine started raving up from normal, guys knew they were in trouble. Back then, they ran engines aspirated with mostly butane/propane, diesels were still new to the oil field or just owned by the big guys in those days who could afford them. But a out of control engine meant a leak of natural gas from the well head. Sometime you can get the engines shut down, most of the time, they blew up! (We all seen this in a recent blowout in Oklahoma on TV) First thing they do, is try to close the BOP's to get the well under control, most of the time, that didn't happen. If they did get them closed off, they would start the mud pumps and start pumping heavier mud down hole to get the well over balance to chock off the gas flow. When that didn't happen, you called in Halliburton with a bigger pump truck to get it under control.
When fire erupts, the only way to snub it out is pretty much with dynamite. Even today. Using the dozers to remove the rig iron, they were using that method back then, too. Nothing has changed. Now you call somebody to do that for you and send you a big bill when its all over with. Still have to remove the old BOP stack from the well and install a master valve to shut it in. For us that have worked around this stuff all our lives and or know someone that has, has experienced a blowout or two in their career and lived to talked about. Just another day at work!

When I was in the boy scouts, I had to skip a big camping trip cause Dad was taking a wild well control class.

It was about a week long, he took me to a few of the lectures, I hated it cause I wanted to be camping instead. But now, kinda glad it went down that way, was really a much more educational way to spend the week.

Not sure if I could do it, but got a lot of respect for the guys that do well control, marine salvage, wildland fire fighting, etc.

Especially the old timers that did it with direct drive dozers, no hydrualics and friction cranes.