What are your experiences with H2S?

Them little yellow monitors you get as part of your PPE are only warning devices. They only can save your life if you pay attention to them and wear them. A low warning of 10 ppm means you have limited time in that environment before you feel the effects. If it shows 15 ppm then get out of that location ASAP. If you hold it in your vent it will ruin the monitor. Btw breathing h2s at 10 ppm for even just 30 minutes can cause you to have severe breathing problems later that day or the next. Cause you lungs interior lining to separate from your lungs.

 

I'd say it depends on your job. Just don't work in the midland/Odessa area or southeastern New Mexico. Bad gas both places.

Idk about san Angelo or south texas areas. Or you can get you a job that's not oil or gas related.

 

Oh man, that's what I thought too! I was down for the count for three days after just a brief encounter with H2S when I was working north of Belfield a few years ago. The guy I worked with was out for two weeks. It was awful, felt like I was dying. I was lucky, though...I was working when I guy loosened a pressurized line and had the whole thing blow up on him and killed him. I can't even read about what the silica dust does to your lungs anymore because that will give you nightmares (and the respirators you get do next to nothing to help). I guess this guy doesn't have enough experience in the oilfield to tell anyone else what to do. If you are just learning about H2S, then you have a lot of other stuff to learn, too. I think he took an economics class once and really likes talking about it (supply and demand...free market...supply and demand...free market...AMERICANS DON'T GET IT...FOREIGNERS DON'T GET IT...only I get it).

 

I work in the south TX area and we have a low incidence of H2S. If you lean over an open hatch on top of a tank your monitor might go off if there is no wind. Most wells have vapor recovery systems in place even though most of these wells are low H2S.

If a big company like Halliburton has problems getting H2S under control at a well they just fill it with concrete and move on to the next one. That could cost them as much as $80 million but that just goes to show how much money is being made in oil.

Here in south TX a lot of precautions are taken to insure safety around H2S. Our company policy is that if your monitor goes off at anything above ten we are supposed to leave the well and call dispatch. In practice, if the wind picks up and there are no more beeps we stay and finish the load. But if a high reading like 35 occurs we are out of there asap and we don't go back until the well operator addresses the problem.

That has not happened to me yet but if any driver has an H2S alert the whole company knows about it by the end of the day. That is the kind of news that travels fast.

I guess I should probably mention that most of what we have here is Condensate rather than Crude so that might account for the low H2S.

 

I just read most of that long account about the guy tripping pipe on the pulling unit. There is absolutely no excuse for what happened there. Any reputable oil company and any reputable well service company will instruct their contractors and employees on the importance of using their Stop Work Authority. The rig operator should have stopped the job and shut the well in, regardless of what the company man said. Any company worth it's salt would have backed him and required a safety team and supplied air before any further work was done. It's that kind of ignorance and indifference that gets people killed.