Paparazzi Ethnography

I had the opportunity on Friday of visiting the testing facility of Schlumberger, located 45 minutes from downtown Houston. Schlumberger is one of the most prominent contractors in the global oil and gas business producing everything from strategic knowledge to explosive devices for opening up rock and thus getting oil to flow.

Bob Jetson (pseudonym), above, took me on a tour of various types of products the company produces for subsea oil well drilling and capture. He was polite enough to humor me in my image making. While wearing a helmet, Bob appears with a Matrix-like hole in the back of his head, as if used by the company to download reality forming knowledge.

The Schlumberger facility has a strict policy of NO PHOTOGRAPHS. The images in this post were taken with permission of my tour guides.

Upon arrival, the entrance to Schlumberger appears like many corporate techno-parks, a combined artificiality and enlightened setting, man-made ponds and foliage transplanted to the area from elsewhere. In fact, the landscape along the drive to the facility is quite stark, just flat land with various prairie grasses.

The land was obtained some time ago, and far away from the center of Houston so that explosive testing could take place. “There is a rumor”, my guide person explained, that the Schlumberger family initially used the property for “goose hunting”, but that just rumor. The present facility and its environs began to expand to its present size beginning in the 1980s.

Any casual observer to the facility will be impressed immediately by two features. First, safety reminders surrounding every available space, on the walls, on the floors, there are reminders for workers to wear their Personal Protective Equipment or PPE. These reminders took the form of posters promoting awareness to fingers, different colored floors to highlight the boundary of PPE gear. Every door mat was custom designed to promote awareness. Here are just a few of the many images I encountered in my trip.
The second thing that is impressive is the kind of work they carry out. I was amazed. It was a real eye opener to see the specifics of how oil and gas is taken out of the ground.

We covered well preparation, the ability to drill thousands of feet into ground, and then, to “service” the hole from a variety of capacities that the equipment is capable of doing not only inside the hole, but the ability to communicate to operators above, what actually is happening. We went over the explosive testing, which opens up the rock for oil and gas to flow into the pipe, and directional drilling, the capacity to direct the drill laterally — the details of this ability are quite extraordinary when explained in person.

Schlumberger has a fabulous website as well, where anyone can look up oil and gas terms.

• Oil and Gas Glossary

Check it out.

Finally, what was amazing to me, was the amount of materials and expert labor required to produce the high level of specifications involved in producing these materials. There were special steel mills that produce metals solely for Schlumberger, and special contractors identified and verified as meeting the specifications of a Schlumberger supplier.

In short, the company appeared to me as a civics lesson in how our society operates. I even mentioned that such knowledge should be taught in grade school –in the same manner as lessons about government or mathematics, so reliant we have become on the work of this vast company.