Offshore Drilling in Western Canada (Page 2)

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On March 13, the drill pipe started to bind on the casing. It could easily be seen that the ice had started to shift (about five feet). This put an angle of 5½ degrees on the surface casing. This shifting ultimately cumulated to 22 feet and occurred every few days. Each time, it involved running a cement plug and laying the rig down. Help came from a most unlikely source - the commercial whitefish fishermen who used bombardiers to which every attached power ice augers. The auger drilled 18-inch holes and was just the ticket for creating a slot so that the rig could move and the casing be brought up into an upright position.

Jim Kirker recalls the fishermen reporting a number of open leads. He was fearful that any night, the lake would open up underneath his trailer and he would be consigned to the watery depths. Despite the proximity of these breaker and the thunder-like sounds and shocks that accompanied them, the camp trailers stayed put although they were subjected to much rocking.

Another upsetting incident which jarred the nerves of the crew was the inadvertent firing of a half-pound of dynamite on the occasion of obtaining a seismic profile, using Al Barlow's Electronic Logging and Velocity equipment. Al claims that it wasn't very much of a charge but Jim reported that it fractured the ice and frightened everyone including the operator.

The well was drilled to 837 feet but not before the core barrel became stuck in the hole during another blizzard on March 23. It was shot off by Barlow and this caused the hole to start flowing from the Devonian reef. The well was once again killed and finally abandoned on March 30, 1967.

Roy mentioned that none of the Indian and Northern Affairs authorities who were nominally "in charge'' visited the rig even though it was in a precarious location. However, he remembers the Fish and Game men checking very closely to see that they had not dumped any mud or other chemicals into the lake.

Murray drilled a second hole in 44 feet of water, 1½miles of Sulphur Point. This reached the Keg River platform at 440 feet and encountered the same problems.

With characteristic persistence, McDermott tried for a third hole in 1968, about 17 miles northwest of Hay River, In an attempt to avoid the shifting ice, a larger rig capable of faster drilling was contracted. This was a Failing 1500 (Sedco Rig No. 77). It weighed 185,000 pounds and alas moved on to the ice February 21, first having had a telephone pole reinforced pad six feet thick frozen into place. Sedco officials had obtained advice both from Murray and from a firm in Winnipeg. The latter had warned that if the platform were built too high the ice would crack around the edges and the exercise would be self-defeating.

An 11-inch hole was drilled to 346 feet and 8 5/8-inch surface casing set. Despite precautions, the ice started to shift and had moved about 26 feet before the test had to be abandoned on March 3. Once again, the ice did not have the strength attributed to it and it also sagged under the rig. Fortunately there was an absence of blizzards in 1968 but unseasonably warm weather created the conditions for a lake some 250 feet wide around the rig at the time of abandonment. Ironically this test did encounter the Keg River reef but it was found to be water-bearing.

Thus ended a unique chapter in the annals of "offshore exploratory drilling in Western Canada". Although a modest exercise by any standard, the experience gained may just have helped other explorers when they tacked similar conditions in the Arctic.