News from the oil patch

> A friend of mine was running fourteen crews contracted to a Canadian oil company. One day, his boss told him to lay off all of the crews.

Do you suppose that there will be some great deals on used total stations and GPS systems? I'm thinking "yes".

I will ask.

>>All of the oil companies are looking to cutting costs.

Yep. Sea change.

http://www.kiplinger.com/article/business/T019-C021-S005-lower-oil-prices-on-the-horizon.html#bKlVhO8T6tJZK4iR.99

> I will ask.

I suspect that the great deals will be from the leasing companies who end up with a boatload of equipment that they hadn't planned on getting back. It's probably a bit early to get the best bargains that will eventually be had.

How many of those oil patch surveyors you suppose have a Kent McMillan Signature Model total station? You may have to accept one with a few modern amenities!

> How many of those oil patch surveyors you suppose have a Kent McMillan Signature Model total station?

I'd guess most of the firms churning out well locations in Texas were using Trimble robots and some Trimble RTK gear. It wouldn't surprise me if a good bit of it ended up in the hands of a leasing company that will not want to have it sitting on their shelves.

Wow, one day busy with 14 crews and the next they are all gone. Looks like there will be a lot of field crew folks looking for work. I guess all the office staff that supported the 14 crews is gone as well.

I have never seen any logic to predict the cost of crude oil. It seems to be
driven by world events and rumors.

i was told surveying is 1% of cost of a pipeline or a well-site construction (in Alberta)

Exploration and drilling specialists and their crews come and go like the weather. It is all about reading logs of seismograph soundings and studying electrostatic readings from decades ago or having access to satellite imagery of underground structures and the ability to pick a good site.

Then they call in the surveyors.

Of all the oil field workers that I have known that have kept busy for years on end are in the well maintenance crews.

They are like your local car service department that monitor the equipment, change out the fluids and filters and keep everything running. No surveying needed.

0.02

Do you have any pictures of surveying in the Ukraine?

> i was told surveying is 1% of cost of a pipeline or a well-site construction (in Alberta)
1% is a good rule of thumb number for any construction.

In February I was giving a hand to my friend picking up some topo on this half-destroyed sugar plant (50°15'9.51"N 24°32'11.61"E). Surprisingly the factory is still functioning (.. the management is stealing, and the workers get salaries at poverty level)

some scary pictures 🙂 :

myself:

GPS base on a roof:

thanks for the pics Yuriy!

Those are great photos, Yuriy, if a bit gritty and grim, as reality tends to be, of course.

Love the photos of your custom-made GPS receivers. Was the base receiver on the roof still tracking satellites under the coating of ice?

it does not seem like ice had any influence - my all vectors were fixed, and gps points checked good with conventional distances. Did not notice any long term gaps in tracking the satellites. May be phase center locations were altered by ice - but I did not notice any effect.

I have realized today that I advertised my receiver - I did not mean that , but it is on every single picture 🙂 I was just using it that day on every setup just in case I would not be able to on the next setup (buildings, trees, short of time), and it takes like 10 seconds to put it on ( I kept the treaded adapter attached permanently to the handle through the day).

> I have realized today that I advertised my receiver - I did not mean that , but it is on every single picture 🙂

I don't see any need at all to apologize. If there is any other poster to this forum who has constructed his own GPS receivers for field use, I've missed it. I think you fall into a special category. It's interesting, too, how you were using them in your survey, that is: rover on the total station with base on the roof. Did you also have some other receivers set up on control points that you were using for backsights?

Point of curiosity: have you investigated how close to the center of the receiver mounting stud the phase center of the antenna is? That is, as you rotate the total station with the antenna mounted on it, does any eccentricity of the phase center show up in baseline solutions?

Thanks Yuriy,
great to have a view on your work conditions!
thanks for sharing them,

Chr.

i was using only two receivers. One on the base and second one I kept in my poket and was putting it on when the conditions alloved. On that job I tied in almost all traverse points with gsp. On the firts day we visited triangulation stations and tied them in. This way we had a raial type of gps network from a single base which incuded triangulation stations an all unknown points where the instrumen was.

I was centering the threaded adapter on an instrument handle which had a dot in the center of it. When you rotate the leveled instrument that dot is not moving. I assume this dot coinsides with instrument vertical axis.

My antenna was calibtated by NGS and I know that horizontal electrical phase center location is vey close to the center of the mounting thread of my receiver.The horiz offset is -1.2 mm in NS direction ans 0.0 in EW direction. These numbers are average values. I described the calibration at the bottom of this page http://mirapract.com/about.html

We use Terramodel RDE module to adjust traverses. This is a beuatiful program. I works wery well even if one has only coordinate conditions in a nstwork. But we had a lot of azimuthal conditions as well (when two adjasent points were tied in with gps)

Thank you fo your questions !! I hope i answered them
Yuriy