There’s a quiet kind of failure in this line of work—one that doesn’t make noise, doesn’t blow a fuse, and doesn’t trigger an alarm. But when it happens, it puts everything at risk. This time, it came in the form of a BOP ram that wouldn’t close. We were rigged up for a pump down …
We’d made it through the first two stages without a hitch. The wireline truck was running smooth, the logging cable tension looked great, and the perforating guns were synced with the system like clockwork. Everything was lined up for another fast plug-and-perf cycle on a horizontal wireline job. Then it happened. We went to set …
You don’t forget the sound a cable makes when it blows out of the hole. It’s not like a clean break or a snap—it’s a whoosh, a violent recoil, and then silence. On that night, it was the last sound I heard before I realized the gunstring was gone. We were deep into a pump …
There are jobs you never forget in the wireline business—and this was one of them. Not because of a misfire or a lost run, but because it reminded us just how fast things can go sideways when you’re dealing with live wireline tools and thousands of pounds of tension. We were halfway through a pump …
In wireline, you don’t always know when something’s gone wrong—until you’re already past the point of no return. That was the case on this job, a typical pump down perforating run on a horizontal well. We had the wireline truck in place, the logging cable tensioned, and the gunstring assembled and checked. The plug was …
It was supposed to be just another stage on a pump down perforating run. The wireline truck was in position, tools were dressed, and we were cruising through a multi-cluster frac job on a long horizontal well. The guns passed initial switch tests, plug was set, and everything looked green on the wireline control system. …
We’d just finished setting the plug on a pump down perforating job—stage one had gone off perfectly. Guns fired, no hang-ups, everything checked out on the wireline control system. But on the next stage, just as we went to arm the string, the system showed an open circuit. Now, any wireline engineer will tell you …
Not every misrun ends in a dramatic misfire or stuck string. Sometimes, it’s quieter than that. Sometimes, it’s a single thread on a single retainer nut that unravels your entire plan. That’s exactly what happened on one of our pump down perforating runs. The kind of job we’ve done hundreds of times. The wireline truck …
In this line of work, you get used to trusting the numbers—volts, amps, counts, depths. But every now and then, the numbers throw you off. That’s what happened the first time we ran a Titan CCL alongside a Dyna firing system on a cased hole wireline job. It wasn’t a misfire. It wasn’t a failure. …
There’s a sinking feeling you get when the logging cable goes tight and doesn’t bounce back. When you realize the wireline truck isn’t moving the string an inch. When it’s not a plug, not a gun, not a debris problem—but a mechanical failure built into your own toolstring. That’s exactly what happened to us on …
