We Own You

For those of you who I havn't spoken to in a while, I thought I would make my first blog post about what I've been doing lately. I graduated from UA in May with a degree in Electrical Engineering. I took a job with Halliburton, and oil-field service company, in Lafayette, LA. Let me tell you, if you have ever hard the words "Cajun" or "Crawfish", this is where both of them live.

Lafayette itself is a pretty good sized town, about 3-4 times larger than Tuscaloosa. The thing that gets me though is that 30% of the people speak some sort of French (at least phrases in everyday conversation that I don't pick up) , I can't pronounce the road names (I live on Kaliste Saloom, pronounced "Call-ee Saloom", and forget about anyones last names, i.e: Savoi (Sav-wah), Guillott (Gey-ott), and Bellager (Bell-on-jay). On the reverse side of that, the food is excellent, and the city itself is actually very nice.

****WARNING-NERD ALERT****

THIS IS PRETTY BORING

So I was hired by Halliburton Seismic Services, a Sub-PSL (product service line) under the W&P (Wireline & Perforating) PSL. Because Halliburton is like the 5th biggest company in the world, it has lots of PSL's and sub-PSL's, basically broken down like this:

1. Sperry Drilling- Drill the wells and run casing
2. Cementing- Cements the metal casing in
3. W&P- Places different tools down the well to record anything and everything about whats down there. This can include what kind of rocks are there, the porosity and permeabiliy of said rocks, how much gas/oil is to be expected there, how much radioactivity there is at certain levels and of course Seismic.
4. Completions-Starts producing from the well

My buddy Darby says I work for Conglom-o (if you remember the Nicktoon Rocko's Modern Life). He is about right.

So basically Seismic services puts a tool down the hole. These tools have microphones in them. We then get a huge source (airgun, dynamite, or most likely Vibrosis Truck), to cause an event at the surface so energy waves can enter the earth. Our microphones pick up this energy. Since we know how deep our tools are and when we set off our source, this gives us the travel time of the energy wave. From that we can tell what kind of formation our tool is at (because energy travels different speeds through different materials-like sound through water and air). And thats basically it.