© 2013 Tiffany Carlson

Weeks Three & Four

Well, in these last two weeks I have made some significant progress in my projects. For the EMP Advisor Tool, my supervisor thought it would be a useful exercise for me to actually start filling out the fields myself to get a better understanding of the offshore drilling process, the potential environmental impacts from each activity, the company’s control measures, and the international and national regulations in place. My answers (after being checked, of course) will act as default answers to the excel spreadsheet due to the fact that most drilling activities are the same from one rig to the next (i.e. drilling the tophole, cementing casings/liners, completing the well, etc.). This will allow rig teams to complete the EMP much faster, as many of the fields will be pre-filled for them. I literally started from square one as far as knowing anything about offshore drilling, but I have really enjoyed learning about the operations through this process.

As far as my biodiversity project, I was able to obtain the global biodiversity scores from Conservation International and overlay them with the company’s drilling rig locations. I also wrote a position paper for Maersk Drilling, indicating their stance on biodiversity and how they view their impact on the marine environment…quite a task for a newcomer! My paper is currently being reviewed by my supervisor.

In addition, this past week I started working on a new project, which involves checking, reviewing, and updating the company’s Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) database. To give you some background, an MSDS is intended to provide workers with procedures for handling or working with chemicals in a safe manner and includes information such as toxicity, storage, disposal, protective equipment, etc. A typical drilling rig has about 250 different chemical onboard, but the database contains over 2,000 products. This project has been a bit tedious, but I understand that it is necessary to keep the system up-to-date.

Apart from work, the company hosted a student event last Friday, which was really fun! The day started out with us touring the Copenhagen Opera House, which was donated by the A.P. Møller and Chastine Mc-Kinney Møller Foundation in August 2000 (A.P. Møller was a co-founder of Maersk). I was amazed to learn about how much detail was put into every square inch of its design.

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After the opera house, we took a two-hour canal sight-seeing tour. It was great to be out in the water and see the city from such a different perspective. We then hopped ashore and finished the evening off with some great burgers and beer…all on the company’s tab, which made it that much better 🙂

Whenever I travel, I always find it interesting to observe cultural differences. So, in my previous post I mentioned the salted licorice that everyone seems to love here in Denmark, but there are two additional Danish habits, which I have noticed. The first is that everyone drinks milk all the time. Not regular milk, but straight buttermilk. I tried it at lunch one day and it surprised me. It’s nothing like I imagined. Very sour, actually. The second, is that people eat mini cucumbers like snacks. In our lunch room, we have these big baskets full of fruit. There are the regular apples, bananas, pears, etc., but then there is also a basket of little cucumbers. It’s just a bit strange to see people running around the office with baby cucumbers…maybe it’s just me.

Here are some pictures that I took today right outside my apartment…

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