Black Gold Production In Russia

While in Iraq or Saudi Arabia it is enough to bore one superficial chink in sand, Russian oil is concentrated in the Siberian bogs where the winter is extremely cold and the summer is very hot.

It is impossible to bore in a bog, therefore oil workers cut down the wood, drain a bog, cover the platform with sand, build a road to it and lay on electricity. These platforms are called “bushes”.

On different deposits there are different chinks. In Western Siberia a chink’s depth is about 1,5 – 2,5 km, in Eastern Siberia – 2-3 km and in the Volga region it can reach the scale of 4,5 km.

For the sinking oil workers use boring rigs which weigh about 1000 tons. On the top of the rig there is a winch with a huge wall hook which drives upwards-downwards a huge electric motor. On the top of the drill string there is a boring cutter.

Via the pipes special drill fluid is boosted under the pressure of 50-150 atmospheres. The fluid passes through the drill string cooling it and then comes back to the surface through the space between the walls of the string and the chink walls, taking out eruptive rocks.

The sinking of one chink can take from a month to about one year – it depends on the number of factors.

Into the prepared chink the so-called casing pipe is lowered, and the space between it and the chink walls is laid concrete.The drill string is transported by means of hydraulic jacks and pushers for drilling of a new chink, and the bored chink is given under the workout service control.

If it is necessary to transport the drill string to another bush, it’s taken apart and sectioned in the new sinking place. For oil to pass into the injected hole, oil worker lowers there a special explosive, which perforates the casing pipe’s walls at the necessary depth. Then an electric pump attached to oilwell tubing begins to swab the oil.

The last point of the construction is called “a Christmas tree” or an “X-tree”.

Here are houses for the drill men. They have a dryer, a bath and a dining room there. The complex dinner costs about $3.
The drill men usually work by rotation method. A watch lasts from 2 weeks to a month. The salary of drill man’s assistant is about $2500-3000.

On every deposit there is a flare for the unused gas burning. The thing is that it’s cheaper to burn the gas instead of refining and selling it. But by 2012 all oil producing companies have to stop burning gas and refine 95% of it.