I've only been on location for one blowout. It was wintertime and I was in the dog house, which happened to have ONE entrance/exit that faced the drill floor. The electric heaters were going full blast in there and the crew was out and about the rig doing whatever. I heard what sounded like hail on the roof of the dog house, so I looked out and there was drilling mud and cuttings blowing over the crown. I ran out of there as fast as I could and ran up the side of a hill with the drillers dog by my side...lol. As I looked down at the rig, gas was screaming over the derrick. Fortunately there was a mist of water with the gas or I'm sure the gas would have been ignited by the heaters and I would have been cooked in there. A day later or so, we finally got the blowout preventer closed and the well killed. It happened so incredibly fast and we weren't prepared for it, since this formation didn't produce close by. I'm grateful to God that he spared me that day. @Smokin Joe
Well, that wasn't one of mine. We've come close a couple of times down the years, but always managed to get the BOPs shut and bleed off the kick, sometimes with spectacular flares.
One in Wyoming took 13.8 mud to kill. That was an interesting week, the polymer mud turned to jello, we were taking kicks up a channel in the annulus, and had to sneak our mud weight up over a pound more than the office said would be too much. The next week was spent fishing 13,500 ft. of pipe and BHA out of the hole.
Then, we tripped in, cleaned the hole, and went back to drilling, albeit slower with the heavy mud.
The operator didn't listen, tried to produce the wrong formation, and P&A'd the well, which is why I know there's an unconventional field just waiting to be tapped. The same zone, albeit without tectonic fracturing near the wellbore is all over that area, and the conventional wisdom at the time was that it could not be produced. There has been a lot of drilling and fraccing progress since then.
