Darrell's page

I am a Canadian living in Chongqing China with my beautiful wife Lizhen and am enjoying life very much! I have many hobbies outside of the "patch" some of which are, travel and photography, military history, aviation (used to fly but now I just sim) and guitar. I am also a seventh dan Taekwondo Master (started my MA as a young soldier) and teach at several schools in Chongqing (when I'm there). I also like to build scale model rigs when time permits. I started out on the rigs after I finished a five year hitch in the army on Mar 5th of 76, on the 8th of March I was slinging a BJ tong on a single service rig! Well since that day I have worked on a lot of iron and even did a stint running tools, I still love it! After many years working the rigs, toiling my way up the ladder from roughneck to operations manager, (on workover and completion rigs) here I am working in the Ghadames basin in NW Libya as an Operations Advisor for Verenex Energy. I've been here for the past three years, involved in a wildcat exploration program with two 1500HP SCR rigs and a 750HP completion rig. I am responsible for HSE plus I provide reliability and efficiency oversight for our drilling and completion rigs as well as the civils construction. HSE is a challenging and interesting field and the role of providing oversight for reliability and efficiency issues lets me keep my hand in operations, never had so much fun in my work! After all this time when I am standing up on the floor looking over the situation I still think, "there's nothin like the sights, sounds and smell of a rig on a fair evening!" Any of you guys that I've worked with in the past see me here, drop a line!