A wellsite drilling supervisor directs and controls all daily operational
activities to drilling, workover, well completion operations carried out by the subcontractors
and service companies on the rig he is assigned to, by the operating oil company. He is the "company
man". His daily work includes directing the proper implementation of the office operational programs, which includes
many funtions, some of which are drilling, workovers, completions, logging, testing, fracking, acidizing,
slickline artificial lift, and many other daily routine operations. He also proposes and executes changes
and amendments to the office well plan, according to the authority he is given by the drilling superintendent, or the drilling
manager, or the vice president of drilling, or the president of the oil company. He makes sure that the
rig is safe, the personnel are safe, the food is good, HSE, conformance to all local, state, and federal, and international
rules, regulations, decrees, norms, etc. He supervises and monitors all logistics, and this is a big job
in itself, especially in remote locations, such as the Rub Al Khali desert of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. He prepares
the oil company daily report from all the daily reports submitted to him, usually
after midnight to 5 am in the morning, and has to have sufficient knowledge of computer systems and
IT people to get the daily drilling / workover reports to the offices in many places, and even do video reporting.
The drilling supervisor company man works 18 to 20 hours per day on the rig, and some of them say
that "The company man is the king of the rig", which means that he has he final say about what does and what does
not go on at the rigsite. With that authority comes the responsibility of well control, because if the company
man fails to control the well ( all the operations ), and if there is a blowout where the rig burns, and the well is
lost, and the oilfield is also lost; then by most IADC contracts, the oil company is responsible for
the damages.
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In more than forty years of work as wellsite supervisor and drilling engineer at the rigsite, Frederick
Wiegand has only had 3 LTAs, no blowouts, no rig fires, and never lost control of an oil nor gas well in his work
in more than 25 countries in the world.
There may be as many as 15,000 drilling supervisors in the world today.
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