Shell Oil leaving……..

Yeah back in the heyday of the Marcellus Shale when Shell came to town a bunch of guys wouldn't work for them. They were absolutely anal about safety. But, they paid well and after a while the safety crap was just part of the deal.

 

I remember seeing the posters of what facial hair was acceptable in the extremely small chance you’d have to put on a respirator. I heard some places will offer you a disposable razor to shave your face before you can come onsite. That’s gotta be the craziest safety rule I’ve ever heard of.

 

I’ve worked oilfield for 22+ years and while Shell is Anal, they ain’t got nothing on Exxon and BP. Since BP had that incident in the Gulf it’s insane how tight their butt holes are. Everyone these days are afraid of being sued for something.

 

That's pretty common hauling oil or water. Or even hauling sand. If theres yellow breathing air bottles at the bottom of the stairs at a tank battery, gotta wear air on top of the tanks.

 

I've spent the vast majority of my working life in mines or oil. They're all big on safety, doesn't matter what company it is.

 

The environmental activists took the novel approach of focusing on getting seats on the board of directors of Royal Dutch Shell until they had a majority and then forced them to sell off their assets. It is guaranteed to hurt the company but they could care less. That’s really the point of it all, really. To hurt the company.

Shell vs. Dan Loeb: It's open season for the market on Big Oil's future

 

Never saw or heard of yellow breathing bottles. I left the oilfield in 2015 tho. I recall reading an article after leaving about how we popped the hatches on the battery tanks was dangerous. The article was about how some men were dropping dead when blasted with the air gushing out of the hatches. Made me think about another article I read about how nobody really bothers to check what is coming out of the ground in the waste water. Some have Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material or NORM for short. On top of not checking, it changes all the time.

Have they changed the well thought out process of gauging the tanks? It was a process of climb 20 feet onto a catwalk, check wind direction, hold breath, close eyes, and pop that sucker open and try not to let it slam closed while being blasted in the face with whatever air came gushing out. Then move, eyes closed, upwind until the gushing stopped. In the Bakken popping those caps was done on every tank battery every time. In the Eagle Ford there was a lot better oil/gas infrastructure so we didnt have to manually guage the tanks.

I’ll never forget one freezing cold night at 04:00 in the Bakken. I was on the catwalk of a battery waiting for the gushing air to stop. It was around -15F with a steady stiff wind. Nobody around for miles. Nothing but open fields in all directions on the Rez. I heard what sounded like a class of grade schoolers singing songs. I stood there frozen in disbelief. No fricken way is this possible I thought, but there it was, the sound of a kids choir coming out of the darkness. I was never so glad to get away from a pad in my life. Even the ones in pitch black on the southern border with groups of illegals walking past never gave me chills like that one.

 

No offense, but someone didnt tell you everything when you were up here then! Lol! Ya, H2S is in some wells. Not very common in the newer wells, but some older ones the h2s will get you! I've hauled plenty where its 1000 ppm plus. Theres some north of Dickinson that are 300k ppm. 1000 will cause instant death.

 

That was the thing tho. It wasn’t H2S that was instantly killing the workers at the hatch.