Raping and Pillaging the Earth

I'm not some nutsy environmentalist. I don't take pamphlets from those Green Peace hippies on the street. I do, however, make every reasonable attempt not to blatantly pollute and destroy the space around me.

Well, perhaps not every attempt. I suppose I do work for an oilwell drilling company, and that sort of activity might be viewed as a tad harmful - not just the creation of a 2km hole into the planet's crust, but also the petro-products that follow. However, what I witnessed this past week in the oilfield was a degree of environmental damage that I'd never thought acceptable.

The office sent me out to Tri-City Rig #41...a brand new double that just rolled off the assembly line last September. Considering my old rig, #13, had components dating back to the early 70s, I was more than happy to check out such a fine setup. It had all the bells and whistles, in fact, a great deal of the labourious things I previously had to do were now fully-automated!

Unfortunately, that also meant that the crew had a lot of free time, and "free time" on the patch means "grab a scrub brush and get cleaning." This was where all my disbelief began. This rig was drilling with invert, a type of drilling fluid which I believe comes from an evil, parallel universe, much like that goatee-d Spock. It's hideous stuff that seeps into your pores and destroys all your work gear. Boots, wetsuits, gloves, coveralls. Everything. What doesn't get slowly broken down is saturated beyond cleaning.

With normal drilling fluid, you mix chemicals with water. With this invert stuff, you mix chemicals with diesel. That's right, diesel is being pumped into the ground and spilt all over the surface. It gets even better. To clean invert off of the rig, you use a scrub brush and a bucket of...diesel! Wanna pre-soak that? Well then, just use the diesel pressure washer! You know how washguns produce a fine water vapour that slowly soaks you? Yeah, well, I'm so pleased to have been in all those confined spaces, being coated by, and breathing in, all that wonderful diesel. There were rivers and puddles of it all over the place.

But hey, you did get in shit if you didn't recycle your pop cans, so I guess that counted for something. Right?

Currently listening to: Matthew Good - 21st century living