I am now wroking on my website for my grad project and am finished with the homepage. I think that I will continue to work on my literature review for mistakes. I am also planning what I will do for my presentation.

Since the last time I have blogged, I have recieved my interview questions to include in my literature review. I finished my literature review and have been working on the self edit. I found that I made some mistakes on transitions and need to include a little more information, but other that this, I believe that I have a good paper written.

Today I worked some more on my lit review. I am still awaiting for my interview questions to be answered to include some of the information in the lit review. Hopefully by tomorrow I will get the answers to the interview and be finished with a draft of the paper. I also have some videos and pictures from my action plan this summer that I will include in my presentation.

Over the summer, I have been working on my action plan, which was to work alongside engineers and geologists at Riliance Well Services. This summer, I participated in some of the jobs that needed to be done while going through the processes of oil drilling. First, they needed to make lines of pipe through the ground to transport oil, gas, and electricity from one place to another. First, a 500 foot trence was dug by a tractor. We dragged all three pipes through the trench and after making sure that none of the pipes crossed each other, the trench was filled so that the pipes would be underground. Another day, I was there for a process of oil drilling called fracking. I don't quite understand this completely yet, but this is part of my research and I plan to learn more about this through my interview. In this process, they used three different trucks, A blender truck, a pump truck, and a sand truck. What happened in this part was:
The sand is simply poured out of the sand truck into a tub in the pump truck, which goes into a tank into the pump truck. In this tank, sand and water are mixed together, which is then pumped into the blender truch which puts them together and sends them down into the hole. I found out that after this they are pumped into the hole to put pressure on the rocks underground to force the oil out. Throughout this process, the geologist and engineer are in another vehicle with very complicated equipment and computers supervising what is going on. They look at the water pressure and tell others what to do accordingly via radio. Through my action, I have learned a lot about what is done to drill oil and found that this is very complex and hard to understand at times.

Notes

Today, I looked back at my foundation questions and am answering the question, "What do petroleum engineers do?" I have taken some notes on this and some other questions and will continue to do so. I am using sites from my webliography. I also today worked on my interview questions. I have about ten questions for a petroleum engineer that I am planning to interview. I will be trying to get in touch with him soon. I am really confident in my project now, since I am easily finding information and I am organized in planning what I am going to do for my project. In doing some of my notes, I have found that petroleum engineers are involved in just about every process of oil drilling, like finding new oil fields, or telling what is going on underground. I also found that engineers analyse the rocks underground, and determine if there is oil underground of where an oil field is found.

After our presentations, I have started to use my sources that I have found and am taking more notes. I am getting more confident in my project the more and more I find on my topic. I am happy that I am doing a project that I am interested in and not a project that would be easy to finish. Now I am thinking about my interview, when I am going to do it, and what questions that I am going to ask. I already have some questions in mind that I would like to find out about oil drilling and petroleum engineering. Also, now, I know exactly what I am going to do for my action. Also, since engineers aren't on the site as much as everyone else and may be very busy at times, I am going to have to schedule an interview at a specific time. I'm thinking of an email interview or a phone interview, although if I can, I would rather do a face to face interview.

Proposal

Today, I started my proposal. I'm having trouble figuring out what I'm going to do for my action. So I guess I'm going to talk with my metor about getting a job at his company for an action.