Day 5 - On the Job...

Today we finally made our way out to the plant here in Tengiz. Surprisingly, it is about a 25 minute bus ride to get there from the living compound. So since my 12-hr shift starts at 6 am, that means I need to be on the shuttle ready to go b 5:30. Needless to say that makes for a very early morning if I want to get some breakfast, which as all of you probably know, I love me some breakfast!

For the sake of my friends and family that don’t work in a refinery, I’ll refrain from ‘geeking’ out about everything that this plant does and providing endless details about the sheer size and massiveness of the equipment. I’m sure that when I get back to El Segundo, we’ll be doing a presentation for all of the engineers about our experiences out here and we’ll go into much more ‘nerdy’ detail! But needless to say, this plant is gigantic!

I got a chance to visit the plants that I’ll be working in with a couple of the national engineers that work out here full time; Mikhail and Vladimir. They are both very sharp young engineers who speak a decent amount of English, but I can already tell that some things are going to be lost in translation. I’m learning to use a lot of hand gestures and quick sketches to communicate better. I found out that I will be working in the Sulfur Recovery and Tail Gas Unit and for those of you in El Segundo, you know that my days in DPD will be paying off for this turnaround!

Other than the plant, the most notable thing out here is the mountain of sulfur. Now when I say mountain, I’m not kidding at all! It’s probably about 35-40 feet tall but probably about 300-400 feet square. It is really rather interesting to see. It’s not just a mound like a sand dune, it’s very square like the base of a pyramid. Oh and there’s about 3 or 4 of these things! And to answer the question that you all are probably thinking, no, it actually doesn’t smell like rotten eggs at all.

So that consumed most of my morning, the rest of my day was filled with just reviewing work packages and asking a lot of questions. I’m learning more and more everyday. Names are probably going to be the hardest thing for me to pick up, but I’ll keep at it. You all are probably wondering why I didn’t post any pictures. I have some that I have taken, but I really don’t like posting pictures of our operating facilities to the internet. I don’t know what our company policy is on it and I really don’t want to risk my job over it. So needless to say, they’ll be in my presentation in El Segundo and they will be on my iPad when I get home for all to see, they just won’t be on here unfortunately.