Hi welcome to drillfloor.com, (formally www,workover,co,uk written in 1998) this website is akin to the drilling club forum that was designed back in 1996 for drilling people to help each other with the related drilling problems, since the time of creation the forum has graduated from the original 6 members to over 5000, during its history the club forum has been wiped out twice, but has always found its feet again, the strength of the club lies in its members and the support it now gets from some of the major companies that have used the club to post and look for information that is not available elsewhere, However drillfloor.com remains a standalone site and is used as a basic education site for the oil and drilling industry, and for storing the many graphics used at the club, after reading the information stored here and should you have any questions or would you like to contribute you are more than welcome to join the club, using the Drillers Club link that is attaché to each group. Unfortunately you will have to register, this take a few seconds and allows you to use any name you wish. Registration allows the club to control some of the unsavory types (mainly the porno) that like to post their links. For people that were in the industry before the late 70’s early 80’s rig boom (often classed as the bad old days) would have seen a lot of changes, unfortunately not all have benefitted the industry, one such change was the laying off or retiring of the older generation (by this I mean age 50+/-), the main lay off started in the late 80’s) Most companies both oil and drilling believed that the older people would have problems with computers and that the younger generation would learn their trade from computer, the downside to this thinking was we now have a lot of desk bound drilling people, by laying of the older generation the industry also lost the experience, unfortunately we now have a situation on our hands where new rigs are being constructed, with very few people to run them, companies from both side are asking people to stay or attempting to get back some of the old school. The drilling industry is now in bad shape, the lack of experience people has already began to show (2007) and has been for the past 5 years, The New builds started not with the main drilling contractor but with the speculators that later saw an opportunity to make big money, not by selling the rigs on but forming their own drilling companies or having the rigs manned by body-shops, if there was any slack in people they have taken it up, they have also started to take  what little talent is left form the majors, Many of the new rigs leaving the yards over the next 2 years will be without crews. However even at this point we see many companies with their head in the sand thinking the problem will go away, it won’t go away, why spend between 175,000,000 and 400,000,000 building a new rig only to sit and watch it rust away due to the lack of trained people. Experience takes time, training needs time, companies have to make the time and find the people to do it, these fly by night on hand schools that have popped up are meaningless, they start the day a person walk into the class room and stop the day they leave, what is needed is on hands training not for 10 days but for some month, by people that can be there when needed, one or two experienced people on a rig that are free to do their thing,  can achieve more than 20 student sitting in a class playing with calculators and filling out test papers, the day will come when contracts will be won not on who has the best and biggest rig, but on who has the most effective crew  that have been trained not to  waste time, effort or expense, The industry face a lot of challenges in the future but until we start to solve this issue we cannot move forward unfortunately the people the industry need do not have that much time left,  you need to make the most of them now,