Tuesday 10 January 2012

The Oil Well in the Woods.

I am brazenly telling anyone who'll listen that I'm currently working on an oil rig.
This, in my mind, makes me sound very masculine, hairy and ruffy-tuffy.
The truth is a little more prosaic.
I spend 2.5 hours a day cleaning the offices, changing rooms and canteen facilities on the rig.

There are 5 wells already producing (and have been doing so for about 15 years) oil. It says something about the price of oil when it's become economically viable to sink another shaft in this quiet part of the south downs.

The bit I clean (the beige bit) is much bigger than it appears in this picture
The rig operators are a German company and everything seems, to me at least, very efficient and alarmingly over-engineered.
They've drilled over a mile down, at time of typing, and still haven't hit the black gold yet.

This is all well (no pun intended) and good but the best bits of the whole site are the nodding donkeys that bring the oil up from the working wells:
Their action is super hypnotic and I daren't look at them in case I become transfixed, mouth wide open catching flies.

Of course I'm completely outraged by this selfish rape of mother earth and the consequent pollution the oil will undoubtedly cause yadda, yadda, but I got to eat baby.

Addendum:
On leaving the site today I saw a mountain biker on a mountain unicycle which seemed to be the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life. I suppose there's a whole mountain unicycle sub-culture evolved since I was a pioneering mountain biker on this small muddy island.

3 comments:

Glyn said...

Tuc Tucs and oil wells in Bognor? Bananas plants growing in the English midwinter? What is going on over there?!

OutaSpaceMan said...

I dunno.
I blame that Harold Camping bloke.

Wartime Housewife said...

I used to work for an oil company in London and we used to take ourselves off on field trips all the time. We went down to have a gander at the Kimmeridge field in Dorset which has loads of nodding donkeys and I agree, they are absolutely hypnotic. They also seem incredibly low-tech when the science needed to have found and drilled the wells in the first place is anything but.

PS. I'm amazed at how often the 'verification word' I have to type in bears some tenuous relation to the subject in hand. My word today is 'ching' to which I would humbly pre-fix 'Ker'.