Drilling Rigs for Dummies

It's not uncommon for our staffers to run across freelance posts that supposedly tell you how something "works," but actually tell you how to use whatever it is. A good example is an article about how flash memory works that explains (poorly) how to insert a flash drive in a USB port and read its directory. That's not how it works, dummy! Similarly, what eHowian Grant D. McKenzie wrote in "How Does a Drilling Rig Work?" at Sciencing.com is not how a drilling rig works...

Grant, supposedly the proud owner of an engineering BS, laid on his own form of BS. According to Grant, a drilling rig "works" this way:

• Assemble the Tool
• Make Mud
• Lay Pipe
• Shake, Shake, Shake
• Finish the Well

Grant referenced our favorite oilfield glossary, but it's distressingly obvious that he didn't use it in his opus (mostly because it's a glossary, and doesn't actually say how a rig works). In fact, the closest McKenzie got to explaining the way a rig drills a well is this:

"When [the driller] reaches the end of the pipe section currently attached to the drill motor, another section must be added to continue drilling. The pipe in the well is disconnected from the drill motor. Another section is attached to the drill motor and pulled up into the derrick, and the new pipe section is connected to the pipe in the well. "

Ummm, dude, the pipe isn't "attached to the drill motor"! In a conventional rig, the motor turns the rotary table, which in turn rotates the kelly connected to the drill string. In topdrive, the motor(s) turn the quill. Pipe is never directly "attached" to the motor.

But that's just one detail. McKenzie's total ignorance of drilling rigs is obvious, because what he listed in his post is (some of) the steps in drilling a well, not how a rig works. A rig works by continuously turning a string of pipe up to tens of thousands of feet long with a diamond-tipped bit on the bottom. The weight of that drill string is what "presses on" the bit to make it scrape its way into the rock. One last point before we go: in his section on "Make Mud," Grant says,

"The drilling fluid lubricates the drill bit and brings the clippings from the bit back to the surface."

McKenzie uses the word "clippings" two more times, but somehow he neglected to look up the term in the Schlumberger Oilfield Glossary he referenced. It's too bad he didn't try, because the word's not in there. That's probably because the word Grant really wanted is "cuttings." Our nominee failed his assignment miserably: not only did McKenzie wander afield from explaining how drilling rigs work, he also botched some of the facts he cited and made up terminology. If that ain't  all we need to name Grant our Dumbass of the Day, we don't know what is.

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