The Toughest Event on the Planet

I was very nervous when I signed up for the Tough Mudder race, especially for the electrodes and the ice baths, but I was ready for a new challenge and it turned out to be a lot of fun. In April 2012 a friend came up to me and asked me if I wanted to join his team for the Tough Mudder race, which is a 12 mile assault course that involves many obstacles and a lot of mud. I was a little hesitant at first because I didn’t want to commit to something so challenging but I succumbed to peer pressure too easily and I signed up.

I must admit the training was hardcore. It was a 5 hour nonstop workout, three times a week for 3 months, but not the regular workout most people are used to or know about. A regular workout consists of cardio, stretch and weights and the dirtiest you can get is with your own sweat, but the training for Tough Mudder goes far beyond that. The “cardio” is 5 hours long consisting of running, swimming and jumping. The “stretch”, well that one can be a regular stretch that one does before a normal workout, but the “weights” consists of lifting heavy logs while running and swimming, climbing high walls, cliff-hanging, and most of the time carrying one of your teammates because they are too weak to continue and all this while being all covered in mud from head to toe. I will admit that I found the training extremely challenging, but only because I was a little out of shape and I had a thing of being underwater for more than 10 seconds, and being in closed and small spaces, but despise these qualms, would I do it again? In a heartbeat.

Mud Toggler And Drilling Software

This race is considered the toughest event on the planet, but all those challenges can be overcome with the appropriate training and in the end even if you don’t win the race, you fill fulfilled when you see all those hundreds of people working together to reach their goal. The drilling of a well is undoubtedly the most recognizable process of the oil and gas industry, but while the purpose of a drilling rig is quite simple, the process, itself, is anything but. Many problems can arise when the drilling process begins. Some of these problems are:

Pipe sticking
Hole deviation
Lost circulation
Pipe failures
Borehole instability
Mud contamination
Formation damage
Hole cleaning

These are just a few of the many other problems we can encounter while performing a drilling operation.

How can we deal with these challenges before they turn to major problems? Well, just like a person that enters the Tough Mudder has to train hard in advance to be prepared for the race, a drilling engineer must prepare himself beforehand so that when he faces the challenges he’ll be able to make a smart move to avoid having bigger problems.

BigCube of Pegasus Vertex

Pegasus Vertex, Inc. offers a variety of software that are the latest in technical advances and they are excellent tools for both onshore and offshore operations, in other words PVI can “train” any drilling engineer to be able to anticipate and therefore prevent any problem that can occur during the drilling process, so they can be prepared to make one of the toughest events on the planet (drilling operations) be a successful one.

“If I die because of this, I’ll be very mad!”

My 7-year old daughter caught cold and ran fever. While taking her temperature, I told her not to bite the thermometer. “There is mercury inside and it is poisonous.” I said.  “Will I die if I accidently break it and swallow it?” She became serious. “You might.” I answered.

“If I die because of this, I will be very mad.” Her comment lost me for a second and then gave me a good belly laugh.

I think it must be logic for her to say that. It is such a small thing, but could lead to catastrophic ending. Her words made me laugh and think.

Our daily lives are packed with small actions. Many of us would think that if we screw up here and there, it won’t be the end of the world. Or at least that’s what we would like to think. It turns out some of the biggest and costliest disasters have resulted from us making a single tiny mistake, such as the natural gas well blowout in Kaixian County, Southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality. The blowout occurred on Dec. 23rd, 2003 and released highly toxic hydrogen sulfide killing 234 villagers.

Investigation later showed that this catastrophe was actually caused by many small acts of workplace negligence, including turning down blowout prevention valve and not igniting the blowout gas quickly enough.

Learning from our mistakes is a crucial step in growing and improving ourselves. However, if we could avoid the mistakes but also learn the would-be mistakes, then we earn our credits without paying too much tuition.

One way of doing so, in my mind, is using drilling software for training, simulating different circumstances and observing results. Just like a flight simulator re-creates aircraft flight and the environment in which it flies for pilot training, drilling simulator with drilling software can allow drilling engineers to see the results from various operation parameters.

In addition to training, drilling software offers engineering planning and design. It is like a rehearsal of upcoming drilling operation, in which we can identify potential problems, gain confidence and increase our success rate.