DEVIL'S CIGARETTE LIGHTER

Heat. Heat. This is a typical terrain you have in the Sahara Desert. And these are your drilling rigs you see operating all over the countryside. There's nothing but sand and rocks and few jackals running there at night. And this country looks a lot like some parts of Arizona and California. This is a vent flare. They're flaring some vented gas. Probably quite a bit of oil still in it from their gathering plants. You see these all over the country, all over the desert. And I have some friends here, these astronauts that ask about these smoke flares we see all over the desert. You can see why they can see them so far away. If we had some wells here produced that much, it'd be nice. But all those people want is oil. They're not looking for any [Music] gas. This next picture you see will be the campsite of Hati Mahoud. And this is where the Allied forces met with the French forces during the war in World War II in North Africa. Now this is the main fire of the GT2 which is going some 700 ft in the air. It was making its own weather at the top. You could see it clouds from miles away. And this is what's left of a drilling rig. He put up safety precautions all over the countryside to keep spectators out and people that weren't supposed to be in there, keep them out. Now, that's a 5-in drill pipe that was blown out of the well. It blew it a half a mile from the location. And this is a site we have when we get there. You have to clear all this debris away. You see your main flow and what's left of the rig. And this fire was started from static electricity. The first thing we have to worry about is getting water. And we could find water only a half a mile away, but it was straight down. So the first thing to do is move in a rig and start drilling for water. Drill into the albian water sand. It took pretty good time to build this derek with the American rig builder to build that in a day or a day and a half. And this is a getting ready to pick up a jack knife rig for the first relief hole. And I think some of these were the 4x drilling and any contractor we could gather anywhere in the desert. This well blew out in 1961, the month of November, and was finished in May of 1962. One thing would say, nobody was hurt or injured on this whole operation. Drilling into GT2 would drill three relief. We started with three and wound up with two of them. Every time we'd work on GT2, we'd leave the country. We'd go off to Nigeria. He would go to East Pakistan. This is your directional driller right here. That's his chart to tell how far down he is and how far off he is from the bottom. And this was the main thing we were shooting for. Now, this is a campsite at the well. It usually accommodated say about 30 men. By the time we finished, I think we had two to 300 men in there. These are our water pits to hold the water which we were drilling for. These water pits were about the size of a football field. We had three of them and they were about 10 foot deep. You would dig these pits into the earth and you would cover them with this polyethylene to keep the water from seeping out. That's one of the prettiest landscaping jobs on water pits I've ever seen. And we didn't leave lose any water here. One thing, this water was just a shade brackish, but after in the sun, it it cleared up real good and the boat had a nice place to go swimming. Red, how far are these pits from the devil's cigarette lighter? They're just about a mile a mile away. And that's where we set up all of our big pump and the whole operating system was right in this area. Looks pretty close from here. Well, it does look close, but that's how far it is when you get over there. Now, this is your entrance into your camp. We had safety men there to protect you. As you come in, check your card. You couldn't get in without a card. As you come into the work area, you had a button. Anytime you left that work area going toward the well, you had a another button. You leave your old button and pick up a new one. That way, they always knew you was here, the man doing the job. Now, now this is something we never had to use. I'm proud we didn't. I don't have to tell you what that thing on the left is. That other is a helicopter. Now, the water lines going up there were 10 and 3/4 in water lines. And this is our working area where we assembled all of our dozers, covered our shields for monitors like here. And all this is just plain corrugated tin. And it gives you quite a bit of protection. The floor of that is covered with expanded metal. And there's coots and myself. We're always drawing something. And the reason we're wearing those sweaters, it was pretty cold in the desert at night. Now, this is our big water cooled hook. This is just to reach in and tear your rig apart so you can remove your well, I mean your rig away from your well. And this is our first bit of water going into our pits. And here are pits full. I don't remember how long it would take to fill those pits. But this water well would flow say 125,000 barrels a day at about 700 lb pressure. Now there's our picture pool and now the time we start to work. It's just like an invasion. Now there's a narrow view of the work site. All of our water pits are full. Now these are the big monitors. Incidentally all of these come from the states too. Come from Ohio how aan brass company. Now this is brand new D8 cats. We had six of them. We had these two, four here covered to drag the small debris and the fifth cat we used to run our big water cool hooks. And this is the way we drag these skids into the well. You have a chain here and a little eye on the bottom. You can back up and they'll unhook so a man doesn't have to get out by the heat to get loose from it. Those are your people in the red uh outfits. That's right. You police about our men is in the red. Now, this looks like an invasion of tanksman. This is to go ahead into the well site and go to work. And you can see in the background, this is our big cat with the little platform on the blade that we stand behind that shield and motion to the driver and he works in a backward position. What's kind of sandy out there? Is it windy? Yeah. So, you have lots of wind. We'd have sand storms. Wind storm we just have to shut down and quit working. But you can see why they use so much rubber tires in the desert because what sand does to those tracks on those caterpillars cuz it was completely wore out when we finished. And then they can get up and around the heat with those tracks. Now, this is the first monitor moved in to get water going. And you cool it quite a bit before you first move to go into the well to look at it and see what you've got. And these are the boys opening the valves to the big pumps that pretty reflection on the water there. Now this is your water cooling off the area to go in and it makes lots of steam and you put move one monitor in and then move the next one a little closer till you get them within say 100 ft of the well. It's just work your way in like you do here. There's men in there working tying onto pieces of steel what's left of the rig to remove it. And one thing you have to remember to save that well head at all times. That's your main thing you're working for. And that's part of the drilling rig and it'll all have to come out because you'd shoot your fire out. It would reignite from all this hot metal. It looked like spaghetti. This is Charlie to right here. And you can see how cool it is. And I'd say he's about 50 ft from the fire. [Music] And there's a mount of water we were throwing. Each monitor is throwing about 1,000 gallons a minute. And it's so noisy up there. You can't hear it. It's noisy that you have a sign language. You operate by just signal each man what you want. Like he's giving them he wants a valve open. So somebody's over by give him what he wants. [Music] You may not really realize it, but when you're up close like this, you get cold, that water gets on you, and there's a draft created by this fire and it just pulls cold air in. You keep that water flowing all the time that you're working. Once you get started with your water, you never quit. Now, this taking a lot of water. It takes an so many pits and flowing the wells at all time. Now there's our little platform we stand on that saves you a lot of footsteps and saves your feet from being burned up. As one the hook drags the iron out, this other doer standing by to shove it out of the way. And here's part of your derek what's left of it. Every piece has to come out of it until it's as clean as your [Music] table. There's lots of heart breaks in some of it. Now you can see one of your relief holes in the background. One thing you never do is get behind one of these cats unless somebody knows you're there cuz the driver can't see you and they can't hear you. What you do is you're pumping mud into the downhole or That's right. You drill into the bottom into the gas sand that it's blowing out of and they pretty well know where it's at. Now this is a big mud tank we're moving out now. These are one of the hardest things we have to move. And there's your big cats. One's pushing, one's pulling. [Music] It looked like they never get it out. There's a probably a fuel tank or a water tank left. And this is what's left of a big mud pump. It just burnt completely up. And all this iron had drug about a half a mile from the well. And you have a group of men to cut it loose over there so that you don't have to run them in back and forth. Here comes our boom out. Probably broke off the hook. So we he keep a safety chain on. So we drag it out and we put a new hook on it. Now there you can see your main flow. That's what we're after. We got it cleaned out on this side and then I to move the rest of the iron off. And you can see what's left of a hydr laying off on your left hand side. Now this is a shield on the boom. And all that is to keep the water off of the men when we go in there and burn because the water would knock the fire out. Also, it would keep the men so cold that get the shiver in there get pretty cold. You know, some men up underneath there burning climb back in there. You in there, Red? Yep. All three of us are in there. There's Boots, Coots, and myself. And uh this is part of a what's left of a drilling rig. You're starting to come out in bigger hunks now. Red, what are you using in there to cut this apart? Well, you just your regular oxygen and acetylene cutting torch. You see back there just burn it loose. You put a big burning tip and you pick out the beam that is holding and just burn them into it and you lace a cable and then drag it out. Now this is your first picture of the well at night after we cleared all of the rig off of them. Just the main well that's there. You can see your relief holes still working. They work 24 hours a day and 7 days a week till they got the welds down. All these men on these rigs are all Frenchmen here. This all I think nearly every rig over there is French French crews, French drillers and all. And this is moving in about 3:00 in the morning to cool the area down. So we get ready to put the fire out that you want to cool this for quite a while. We cooled for about 6 hours and waited on the proper weather. What do you mean by proper weather? That the wind was blowing away from the camp. They wouldn't blow all the gas over the camp and over the men working when it goes out. But here throwing the water and just to see how we drive the flame up in the air to put our shot. You'd put your shot right at the base of that flame. So we were well satisfied with that. And we just let it run for the rest of the day and prepared to shoot it out the next day. Now, this is your drum that we rig up to carry our explosives in. That drum must be close to 4T in diameter. And the smaller drum inside of it. And that drum and red one there will put in say around 550 lb of solidified glycerin. What it be? Obwell explosives. Then the outside will be laced with this Anel chemical dry chemical. It'll serve as an insulator and also as knocking out any ground fires when the shot goes off. Now, there's our shot bucket. Now, here's our exploded being loaded into the drum. Incidentally, all of these charges set off electric and they're shaped the way you want them shaped. Now, this is when you get down to wonder if you've figured out the best charge or the biggest charge or the proper charge to knock the fire out. And also, you get a an awful headache from this glycerin here. It doesn't show up now, but after you get this thing going, it gets to wiping it on your forehead. If you've never had an explosive headache, you've never had a headache cuz it's nothing for it. We try to take onions, raisins, everything else, but the best thing to do is wear out. That's totally helping remember the main charge. That's your heart of the whole shot is where you're shaping the small one. And you notice all my men are in the red coveralls and the other boys are in the blue and the white helmets. What are they putting in now? That's your antony dry chemical. Then we bolt the lid in place and all those wires are wrapped insulated with asbestous. You've taken all these small pieces and made a shaped charge. That's right. Get the effect that you want. Right now you've laid this asbestous over the outside. I think we have close to 300 yards to go from where we were loading the charge to get into the well without any protection. And it had to be timed just right cuz we didn't have but a matter of few minutes to get in and out and if we' have broke one of these electric lines would been kind of rough. So I drove the bulldozer boots directed me and coots and told her looked after all the electric lines. Main thing is get in there and get your shot in place and get out of there. Now you notice Coots takes a line here. I'll go off to the right and Boots will set the charge off. He had a little blasting machine that had us worried for a minute. And you notice it lift the whole dozer in just a second when it goes off. There she went. Now there's lots of shrapnel. You can see it hitting all around it. You always look in the air because it's coming high when it comes over [Music] you. Now everything is sign language from here on out. No more motors running anything except the cap we have in there. And our main deal now is to get in there and get that dozer out. And you'll notice when uh all this debris cleared away and the smoke cleared away, everything we had up there just concussions tore it all apart. It's broken all of our water hose, tore the tent off all of our shields. Was there anybody in the dozer when they shot one off? Oh, no. He's out and he's up there with us. I drove it in. But you see how small it looks now compared to the volume. There's the my crew there. Not something over to the right. I don't know what it was, but concerned. It must been some spectators coming in. And see, it doesn't even the shot doesn't even hurt a hook. It just shoots the end of it off. And this is a moment you you get kind of ticklish here on kind of these rocks flying around this well and creating static electricity. And you see how it's picking all of the water up. That's probably getting in the air and you can see it going for miles. That gas was probably going 25 to 30 miles through the desert. All looks like you sprung a few leaks in your water hoses. Yes, you see the holes in the strap will come through it. And there's your wellhead. That's the thing we worked so hard to save. Now, here's our bulldoers clearing away the debris at top of the ground. And he runs in low gear and he just skims over the top so he doesn't make any sparks and get all these loose rocks away from us. After we clear this up, then we move our big drag line in and then we start digging this hole around the wellhead. It'll probably be about 80 ft in diameter and about 15 to 20t deep till we find good pipe. About how long does it take to dig a hole like that? Oh, he had it dug in about 8 hours. the way we want it. We made ramps into it to get in and out. We'd keep water going because every time the bucket would dig into the dirt, it would be hot and we didn't want to have anything to get in that [Music] flow. There's our bucket's working now. You stay in there and you direct the driver and it gives him a little confidence that it's not in there by itself. [Music] Uh after digging into the ground to expose this uh 16-in conductor pipe and our braiding head which was on crooked, we had to rip this casing off but saws to expose it. And after we exposed this, it was long deep enough to where we could put another head on. We placed our I think it was a 9/16 sand line around here to cut this off flush. We had to cut through 13 and 3/8 and 958 casing, which the 958 was landed up here. When you pack your ears with cotton and Vaseline, that seems to hold up better than anything for that big noise. I hear taking your concrete away from around your pipe. It's been circulated from bottom up. I said one thing, they had a good cement job on it. Who's the fellow in blue there? That's LeBlanc. He's with C. He's one of their engineers. He's an awful good hand. One of their drilling engineers. He stayed with us the whole time. Now, this operation here was sawing off some 16-in conductor pipe with big hacksaws. Now, those blades come from the states cuz we couldn't find any over there. And you keep water on this blade and those hammers are non-sparking tools. We take turn. We had plenty of manpower and you let one saw till he got tired, then another one take over. Now, this is a sand line, a 9/16 line we used to saw the head off with. It just wrapped around it at about a 90 degree angle and you just wear the pipe and two and that's about 8,000 ft of cable and you pull around at about 300 ft a minute and to one end of the line and you reverse it and pull it back the other way and it just wears it in two and that took about 48 hours. There's 4X drilling contractor there. You had different ones from all over and they never stopped day and night. Now here you can see where your line is cutting into your flow of gas. That's cutting into your 9 and 5/8. And that would casing we were sewing on too. Both strings. This is where you take electricity around. Why are you cutting this off? You have to separate your 958 from your braiding head. And they're set in slips. And there you can see your flow coming out. Now, what we're going to do now is put on this cutter we made and cut the 13 and 38 down to where we can find the 95/8 casing and see what it looks like. I'm going cut a piece of it off so we know how thick the pipe is and if you think it'll stand that pressure. Now, this cutter was made in the states and I designed the cutter and I had marker and associates. They did all the drawing and then the crowder gear made the tool for us. You see how it feeds itself and it worked beautiful. It's kind of windy out there. That's a coming from the well there. That's a suction that would lift you off of the ground. If you We could work until say 11:00 in the morning when it got hot. Then you would have to shut off and come back out on about 4 in the evening cuz in the heat of the day, so much turbulence you couldn't hardly stay in that hole to try to pick you up. That that cutter is operated with a little air tool. There you see it still working. You see, it'll blow it off there in just a second. There she goes. She's free and clear. You see that hook lift up when it when it came off. I see where we exposed our 958 casing. Then we cement between the two. Now, this is a foolish stunt. And there's the reason we saw it off. You can see where the 958 is landed in there. And that head's no good. It's just erosion. It eaten it up. And this will be our big hinge bolt that we put on our Cameron AW type head. That's a I think a 14-in 1500 series braiding head and that hook that I mean that uh hinge will be welded onto the side of it. Is that for swinging around the preventers? That's to swing it around. That's for your main cap of the well and everything is checked and double checked and all it holds that packing in there just your rubber packing holds all your pressure together. Then you have your slips to hold your head on. keep it from coming off when you close your preventers. Those are your guide that you'll snub it on with. We snub that on with two 1-in offlade lines by using this big boom. Now, this is a Cameron braiden head. It's an AW type head which will pack off on 13 and 38. This is made for 16in pipe. So with our boom up here with this big fork which holds it up. Then we have these snub lines that go down through its eyes which is a 13 and 38 casing clamp. We snubed it down. We push it over the flow and snub it down on over the flow. This doesn't take but a matter of say an hour and a half of rigging up and say about 20 minutes to put it over. And this is the way we get our braiding head over. Now we have some slips that will go inside of this to seal off on a 13 and 3/8. You can get a side of the flow compared to a man. It's pretty good flow. Now, this is the operation of putting the head on. It goes on. Looks awful easy. Now, our head's [Music] on. Uh, after we've got this blading head over, this is a 16in, I think 900 series flange. These are your slips and your packing element that use this. that's easy to set in and it sets up here. You jack your bowl up to energize your slips. That leaves you all of your bolts up here to tighten in on your packing which will seal off on your 13 and 3/8 casing. Therefore, you have a flange here and a seal inside to control your weld from up above. This is what's put in as your AW type slips and they're sealed by your Allen head screws going down on your packing element. That'll pack off our 13 and 38 and give us something to tie to. Now, this is your packing element. That's your AW slips there. You packing on the top and you tighten it down with Allen head [Music] screws. And that's going to hold the whole works on the well. Incidentally, all of this equipment going on this well is made by Cameron Iron Works. Now, this is our safety engineer. We had about five of these fellas around and they were little gas detector looking for gas. Now, this is your printer. That's a 14in 1500 series preventor with blank rams. And we'll open it and double check it. And that's what'll divert our flow out. Our two flow lines. Below this pre 6-in flow lines, and they have two valves on each side. One's a Cameron manual valve and the other is a Cameron type F preventor. You check everything personally. Look, check it all oursel. We don't trust it for anyone cuz it's easier to check it on the ground than is on the well. All this has been assembled and tested. It doesn't show the testing of it's already been tested. And we'll put it on with his two manual valves first. Then after we get it on the well, then we'll put our HCR valves on it and then our flow lines on it. Now, this is a moment we've been waiting for. Now, this is setting your slips on your head. On a normal operation, that head would be tied to your 16-in pipe and your 13 and 38 beed in it. And when it gets where you want, you drop your slips in it. But we're doing just backwards here. You're jacking the head up. We jacked the head up through the slips. Then below that to hold it up, we put a big casing clamp on that 13 and 38 casing to hold it up. Then once the pressure hits it, it'll keep it up from then on. Now this is our main operation. You this when you get down to the time where you've hoped you haven't overlooked anything. And this is not normal operation with all these men because usually just be myself and my three men. But these men had worked so long that they all wanted to work on this final operation. So, we had to go ahead and let them, but we didn't like it. Here, we're still checking for if it's safe. Now, this is raising up the back side of the preventor to get your bolt in [Music] place. The main thing is not getting anything in that flow. Everybody set on ready. You have these lines which will swing it around and blow. There you see we have a there's your stop bolt that will keep it from swinging all the way around. It'll only go 180° then stop. We have a snub down line on the opposite side from a big hinge bolt that will pull it down on to where we can get our boat started. Now this is what we call about 15 to 30 minutes of eternity here. If anything happen and be kind of rough blowing rocks and I'll have to give those boys credit. And one of them stayed there and some of them got hit pretty hard with these rocks. The next operation is to get down in below this and get these bolts in it and pull it down on without any leaks. Looks kind of rough down that pit. It gets rough that the expansion of that gas is making lots of ice and the blow of it will you just don't want to get your head in the flow. And here's a rope we put around it to straighten it up a little bit so it'll come on down proper like we want it. But you notice how everybody pitches in and works. They all want to help all they can. Now here the operation of putting those bolts in. It gets a little spooky down there, but you know you're not too far from the end of [Music] it. Now here's all the bolts. We have very little bit of leaks left. That's total down there backing me up on those bolts. You can see our snub line that helped pull it on in the front of [Music] us. And this is what you waited six months to do. Whenever we get this all bolted down and this we're satisfied with everything in place, then we turn it over to Mr. Leblanc and his crew of men with him took their flow lines up. We taken all our snub lines off of it. Then we'll put a big cement block around it to hold it in place. This is Mr. John Kers in the white coverold. He was the head man for the C over there and then for Copa. And this is when we're getting all the final deals over and finding out when you can catch a plane to get out of there. Now this is your preer with a safety lock on it. What's the safety lock? That's so the rams or something was to bump it. They wouldn't shut the rams and put the flow and turn all that flow out your flow lines. And all of this stuff that operated [Music] hydraulic and we had the big pump trucks over and have high pressure lines laid up and be tied into your closing side of your preventers and your opening side. We will close these top preventers, close them on blank ram, turn them out these flow lines until they're 7in flow lines and they're about 1,500 ft long. They just flow to nowhere. They just bring then we'll flare it out into this the desert. This is a choke manifold they put up. And this is the thing you you worry about right here is pumping it shut if everything going to stay put. And it closed off beautiful here. Then we put a 10-in camera DV valve on top of it for a backup valve. And flowing on two sixinch flow line. was flowing on 1,900 lb and making 410 million ft of gas. Now, this is what we worked 5 1/2 months for to install on this GT2. The first piece of equipment was AW type Cameron 900 series braiding head. We had this special spool which was a 14x4 spool with two 6-in outlets. Then we had this pre which is pressure operated and that was a 1500 series preven. And what we did in this case, we clo opened these two valves. These are 6-in type F valves. We opened the divert our flow out each flow line. Pumped this valve shut. That stopped all of our flow here. Turned it out each flow line. And on the two 6-in flow lines, this wellhead was right at 1,600 lb pressure and making right at 445 million cubic feet of gas a day. There wasn't a leak anywhere. We rigged up on top, run drill pipe into the bottom of it. And it's the irony of the whole thing is they don't want gas. So they'll cement this well up and just leave it. Now this is an aerial view of the whole operation. You see our areas we worked in safety areas and our camp in the [Music] background. And one thing we're proud to say there wasn't one man hurt on the whole job. And these are our mud pits and the mud trucks and all to pump the mud into the well. And they would pump in through these two relief holes. And this Mr. Kuriche give them the go ahead sign. So all the valves would be opened and they would be pumped in through your relief holes and go into the devil cigarette lighter which not going to be with us much longer. Now this is your mud pit and that's about 22 lb mud. I don't know how many thousand of barrels they had but they had an awful elaborate setup. One thing on a job like this you never look at the cost of it. The main thing is getting it done. It has to be done. And there's a word we have an oil patch. There's no such word as can't. We'll do it somehow. This is our last look at the areas we're leaving headed for home.