Drilling rig
A drilling rig is the equipment and crew brought in to drill a new wellbore, from surface down to the target formation.
A drilling rig is the mobile equipment package — derrick, drawworks, drill pipe, and the crew to run it — brought onto a location to drill a new well. Rigs get sized and staged to the job: land rigs for onshore wells, larger and more complex rigs for deep or horizontal targets, and specialized offshore rigs for wells drilled from platforms or floating units.
Working on a drilling rig remains one of the classic ways into the industry, and several guests on the show describe climbing the crew ladder from pumper or roughneck up through a workover rig and eventually onto a drilling rig crew, a path that builds hands-on knowledge of how a well actually gets built before moving into engineering, management, or ownership roles.
Heard on the show
“build a location, I would take care of bidding out all the work, all the equipment. We get the drilling rig in. Uh, I designed the well”
“And I eventually, you know, earn earned my way up to the Derrick and and then worked on drilling rigs”