How Not To Drill A Project Pt 1

I was never really one for keeping a diary; I’m fundamentally too lazy, and not nearly introspective enough to sit down every day after my sausage-and-mash supper to scribble down the day’s events. I tried once when I was working in Turkey and ended up with half a dozen pages of forced, trite, verbal garbage about an ex-girlfriend that made me cringe when I read it back a few weeks later. I binned it. With hindsight, I wish I had kept at it because this blog relies largely on my rapidly fading memories of nearly 40 years in geology and mining. It’s become a sort of “hindsight diary” reliant on my decades-old impressions rather than in-the-moment detail.

This is why I never kept a diary.

The only time I did keep a regular diary, I had no idea that I was doing it. In 1996 I was sent to Iran by Anglo American to supervise a drill program at a gold project called Zarshuran in the north of the country. It didn’t go well. A perfect storm of awful rock conditions and stunningly inept drill company management had our number before we’d even started. We were doomed but we just didn’t realise it yet. The drillers were the most comical I have ever had the misfortune to hire; their lack of talent and common sense was a wonder to behold, and the managers couldn’t be trusted to sit the right way on a toilet. We only drilled 7 holes in 3 long, ball-breaking months of drilling and those holes cost us/me a whole world of pain and frustration, yielding shitty core recoveries and not enough data to make a firm decision on the future of the project.

Arsenic mining at Zarshuran

I faxed a routine daily drill report from our camp camp back to head office in London via a dodgy satellite phone at the camp: I had to lean out of the cabin window and press on a specific point on the antenna while it was operating otherwise it wouldn’t work, and it gave up functioning all together at sub-zero temperatures. As the late Iranian summer dragged into autumn, and we were only getting 1-2m core a day, the water pipes began to freeze overnight, and my daily reports got more and more fraught before the drilling finally ground to a halt in November as winter set it. I can only imagine how much the London team dreaded the daily chronicle of desperation spewing out of the fax machine. Happily, my boss at the time (thanks Dave) had the presence of mind to a) recognise that I was documenting my own slow decline into total lunacy, and b) to keep the daily reports and bind them together into a single document; an ad hoc diary of my misadventures which was presented to me at the office Christmas party later that year in Budapest. This piece is based on the daily faxes which I still have, 25 years later.

Arsenic and Old Machines

Zarshuran (“The place of the gold washing”), was 7,500ft up a mountain in West Azerbaijan province, about 5-6 hours northwest of Tehran. Technically speaking, it’s a Getchell-style Carlin gold system that was flagged by management because it was an active arsenic mine hosted in limestones, and arsenic and gold often go hand in hand in similar gold systems in Nevada. Rather than go through the pain of trying to bring in a western drill company, we decided -for local political brownie points- to use an Iranian drill contractor that I’ll call COREO. They still operate today -God only knows how- so I’ve changed the name to protect the guilty.

COREO was one of the few local Iranian companies that allegedly could handle diamond core drilling. We hired them after a due diligence visit to a drill site near Shiraz where they were supposed to be drilling concrete grout holes in crumbly bedrock for a dam project. (We found out a few months later that the dam project wasn’t completed to spec. A lot of the holes were stopped short of the required depth needed for a stable, concrete grouted foundation, but they were booked as having been drilled to full depth on the invoices. The moral being, don’t live downstream from dams in Iran.)

Our due diligence visit to COREO’s dam drill project.

It’s A Shit Show

From the outset, it was obvious that COREO were a shit show, but we had no other choice. We couldn’t get a North American company in to the country without a lot of paperwork, so they got the job. We knew the rock would be challenging to drill, but we naively thought that COREO had the personnel and gear to handle it. We contracted them to provide 2 wireline core rigs that could handle PQ (8.5cm) core and triple tube drilling for the expected bad ground conditions. They also had an English-speaking driller in Shiraz who’d worked on the Persian Gulf oil rigs and was keen to get back to working with westerners. What happy, innocent children we were.

A happy Turkish geologist about to log something

Mobilisation took a month. Two rigs arrived at Zarshuran on some very ratty old flatbed trucks. COREO’s management had decided that having actual drill rods and drillers to operate the machines and twiddle the rods about was an unnecessary logistical inconvenience and we could do without them. When 2 drillers finally did arrive, they had no accommodation, food or toilets. They were kipping in a 12m shipping container and using the hillside as their field loo, which made soil sampling somewhat hazardous. One of my early reports noted dryly “morale is generally at a low ebb due to the poor living conditions and lack of head office back up.” We found out later that the management of COREO were also the owners. They paid themselves a healthy dividend every year, and so any supplies they bought impacted the dividend, hence they didn’t buy anything. Drill bits, rods, mud.. Nada.

The loneliness of a mud pit digger. Note the uber modern drill rig.

Let’s Play “Find The Manager”

COREO eventually sent a project manager to site, Mr. Paknejad, who initially thought he could manage the project remotely from his office 1,000km away in Shiraz. In the one and only site meeting we had, which was akin to trying to have a calm chat with a screaming sleep deprived 5-year-old wired on 2 litres of Mountain Dew, he told me that “…mobilization would finish when he said it was finished and not before, and anyway who were we to question him (hint: the client) and besides, he was doing us a huge bloody favour sending anything to site.” He then jumped in his truck, and fucked-off high speed to the nearest town, ostensibly to make a phone call to head office. He never returned, no doubt judging (correctly) that the bad-tempered satanic foreigners who had the temerity to question his competence might not welcome him back to site.

Iranian drillers about to break something

A few days into the drill program and progress was painfully slow, as little as 2-3m per shift. We did what we could with the gear available, advised by Dave, an experienced Australian drilling consultant we’d flown in to knock COREO’s crew into some sort of shape. When Dave had a head of steam up with the local crew –i.e. every day- he was a force of nature. He was built like a haystack, his eyes looked in 2 different directions at the same time, and he couldn’t sit still for long because of his hemorrhoids. With hands the size of tennis rackets and a quiet but vaguely threatening way of speaking, his beastly demeanour terrified our Iranian friends. But we were fighting a losing battle against local incompetence. There was still no sign of the return of Mr. Paknejad, who we finally threw off the job, and our containerised core shack with space for 150 core boxes was beginning to look a tad optimistic, but with fuck all else to do while we waited for core it was well organized.

Arty drill core photo.

By mid-September, we were on to our 3rd COREO supervisor. Supervisor-3.0 showed up on site wearing shiny black shoes, nice pants and a button up white shirt. My fax notes “I’m not quite sure what his role is as he doesn’t seem to know much about drilling and is a gemmologist by training.” I not-so-politely suggested he put on some coveralls and some fucking boots which he did. He then sat down on a stack of greasy PQ drill rods and casually asked me what all the pipes were for before telling me, the pipsqueak project geologist, to “shut up and stop shouting because I was only the geologist and HE was the manager.” He piped down when Dave told him he’d have a hard time managing anything with a PQ core barrel stuck up his arse. He left 2 days later, shoes still shiny.

Who Needs Core Anyway?

We still weren’t really drilling. We’d filled 4 or 5 core boxes with crumbly black shit but there was nothing else to show for it other than a bunch of unhappy COREO people who had grossly over-estimated the level of ineptitude a western mining company was willing to put up with. I gradually came to understand 2 key points about COREO’s interpretation of our contract. They thought we were paying them a flat daily rate to be on site, so the longer the mobilization process took the more money they made, but we weren’t and horror of horrors, unlike most of their clients I’d actually read the contract. We were paying by the meter with hefty penalties for poor recovery. So, at 4m a shift, with only 1 machine running, their revenue was less than US$400/day. To make matters worse, they weren’t paying their miserable drillers and they couldn’t source the much-needed PQ gear which they were contractually obliged to provide. We ended up paying the drillers directly and netting it off their invoices, which went down a treat with COREO’s blood-sucking management, and we ended buying and importing the drill bits we needed to ensure we had a basic level of equipment.

Dave, about to shout at someone.

September 13 was the low point. Two operational machines, 3m of total advance and only 70cm of core. Dave noted cynically that “(luckily) it’s not costing us much to watch a bunch of people running around trying to drill.” Ground conditions were still horrible: September 23rd, in the middle of drilling hole ZB96-1, my report states “Only one word for the ground we’re drilling in 96-1 and it’s best not written down here.” The main mineralized zone was essentially black sulphide-rich modelling clay with random blocks of hard yellow orpiment that might be 3-4m across, and the host rock was generally the texture of wet sugar granules, not conducive to recovering much core.

The good stuff. A rare box of core.

A Comedy Of Errors

The COREO screw ups were endless. I found chunks of broken drill bit in the core boxes. The wireline cable snapped nearly taking a driller’s thumb off. The night shift’s diesel oil drum heater was knocked over nearly incinerating a rig and its crew (it looked spectacular from a distance though). An offsider dropped a PQ rod on his ankle breaking it. The fluid sumps were too small. A rod snapped at the top of the hole. They ran out of bentonite and super mix, and plastic water pipe.

It eventually became a bit too much for me and I finally snapped, leading to a humdinger of a shouting match with the new drill supervisor Mr. Charifyan. I let him know using some undiplomatic Anglo-Saxon cursing -which included various terms for male and female body parts that thankfully he couldn’t understand- that he should start bloody managing something and stop sleeping in his pick-up truck. My daily fax noted that in the heat of the moment I’d told him his IQ level was on a par with a domestic appliance I’d once owned, which was being generous. He left soon after once it dawned on him that we paid the bills and he worked for us, not the other way round. My final comment about him that day reads “He is childish in the extreme and has no comprehension of the spirit of contracts or agreements. I now feel that I’ve been far too generous with COREO.”

Jack Frost

By late October, winter was well on its way to Zarshuran. Jack frost went a little psychotic on the project, and we started to freeze up every night. We’d wake up to frozen water lines and hypothermic night shift drillers, and any drilling had to wait until the sun had defrosted everything. Fortunately, this gave the drillers the perfect excuse to skive off every morning for fried eggs and a smoke, so progress slowed from a snail’s pace to glacial: 2m of core from 2 holes in 36 hours. It was bloody cold, so in the true spirit of environmentalism, we used old fashioned thermonuclear kerosene heaters to keep warm in the core shed, while the drillers burned buckets of diesel in large oil drums. We also became the lucky custodians of a rather obese mouse which had sensibly moved indoors to avoid the cold, then scoffed all of our chocolate biscuits and crapped in the printer paper.

By November 3rd, the writing was on the wall. Thumb-twiddling and nut-scratching had taken over from drilling and we got no progress from either machine. I decided to shut the program down a few days later on November 7th when COREO told me they wanted to re-drill a hole we’d been having major difficulties with. The idea of spending another 3 weeks watching a bunch of clowns try to re-drill a hole in shitty ground in the middle of the winter was a non-starter.

A drill rig with not much happening, as usual.

Thank God The Pain Has Stopped.

Friday November 8th was demob day. COREO got off site with unnatural haste, far quicker than when they’d arrived. Three flat beds and a crane showed up, the rigs were loaded and off they went down the mine access road, getting out of dodge and away from me as fast as they could. I decided not to stick around watching the local clean-up crew burying rubbish, picking up poo and filling in sumps. During site clean up, COREO thoughtfully asked if we wanted to turn the used mud pits into flower beds. Bless.

As a parting gesture, I arranged to have the drill collar coordinates properly surveyed before I shipped out. In the true spirit of the project, the surveyor turned up with no maps, no idea what coordinate system the previous survey had been done in and no offsider to help. All very reassuring.

So How Did It All Go?

We’d started drilling September 1st and were “finished” by November 8, completing about 1,015m of core drilling, or roughly 15m per day between 2 machines. Those of you who’ve run drill programs will know how monumentally shite that is. A decent North American company would complete that in under a month even with bad rock conditions. And it wasn’t just the poor daily rate that hurt, it was the intense pain we went through with COREO’s management, day in day out, who’d convinced themselves they were actually a good drilling company. The constant fighting with them over everything from drill bits to shifty invoices had worn me out and I was badly in need of a break so I flew out to Hungary and the calm of our regional exploration office in Budapest.

The next year we were back at it with a larger drill program at Zarshuran. This time we were smarter -or so we thought- sacking COREO and choosing instead to retain an Australian drill contractor that had a modern, truck-mounted, multipurpose drill rig parked up at BHP’s massive Reko Diq copper project in western Pakistan. It seemed like a great idea at the time, that is before nuclear tests, corrupt customs officers and endless police check points conspired to screw up our best laid plans. But that’s for Part 2.

So much pain in such a small book.

And remember..

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4 thoughts on “How Not To Drill A Project Pt 1”

  1. Not all the drilling contractors fault really, you can’t core putty rocks. The rig spec would have been sent at the proposal stage and should have been picked up as being inappropriate. It’s horrible to watch any drill program go wrong particularly when management are on site but even a basic kick off meeting and site visit by the client would have prevented a lost season and massive cost impact.

    1. That’s all good & well but the rig was take it it leave it. And kick off meetings only work if 1) the counterpart knows what it’s for & 2) sends somebody competent. Assume for a minute that none of that was true in this case…

  2. Bloody hell Ralph, every new story tops the previous one.

    As someone who is about to start his own drilling programme in a 3rd world shithole country perhaps not similar to Iran, maybe I’ll get your little story translated and give it to my driller to read.

    Regards

    John

  3. Thanks again for a great story. Luckily my worst drillers were not as bad as these guys! Can’t wait for the second instalment.

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