Oil Rig Jobs

So, you want to get hired for jobs on oil rigs? Then you had better find out what happens on an oil rig, hadn’t you? First off, you could say that an oil rig’s life can be divided into 4 different phases:

• Drilling – a hole (5 inches to 36 inches) is drilled into the earth. During this process, drilling fluid (also known as mud) is pumped in to help cool down the drill bit and remove the rock cuttings. After this, steel tubes are inserted into the hole to provide structural integrity. These pipes are 30 feet long, and also help to isolate potentially dangerous high pressure zones from each other and from the surface.


• Completion – this is just a fancy name for getting the oil rig ready to pump oil. The deepest sections of steel tubes are perforated so that oil can flow from the reservoir. An additional set of tubes is added to provide redundancy, allowing oil to flow from the reservoir to the surface for collection. In older oil fields, there may not be enough pressure underground to pipe the oil to the surface. In this case, additional pumps are installed. Using these pumps is called “secondary recovery”.


• Production – this is what you have been waiting for. The well is connected by the pipeline to the refinery, and the oil is finally allowed to flow. Sometimes, additional systems called “tertiary recovery” are installed to get more oil out of the ground. Maintenance is also performed on the oil well, including replacing the steel tubes and pumps where necessary.


• Abandonment – the rig no longer produces enough oil to make a profit. Cement is pumped into the hole, and then capped and buried.

When you are new and inexperienced, you will probably only be involved in the production phase. You are unlikely to be called on to work in the drilling and completion phases.

Most wells are dug to produce oil. However, many oil rigs also produce gas as a byproduct. In the past, this gas is usually just burned off. Nowadays, oil companies are more ingenious in dealing with this gas. In the US, this gas is often piped to end-users. If there is no market for natural gas near the oil rigs, the gas may be collected and converted to synthetic gasoline, diesel or jet fuel . This natural gas could also be injected back into the reservoir, to extend the life of the oil well.

Both onshore and offshore oil rigs share the same life cycle. The difference is that offshore rigs have to be more robust, and have to be built on water. This results in more complicated logistics and a higher cost. Many offshore oil rigs are still relatively near land, and rig crew are commonly transported by helicopter, e.g. oil rigs around the US Gulf coast. For oil rigs in the deep ocean, the rig crew have to be transported by ship. Ship journeys take longer, so workers on offshore oil rig rigs have to work for longer stretches, maybe 4 or 6 weeks instead of 2 weeks.

RigWorker.com has been helping people get oil rig jobs since 1998.

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