One Shell elsewhere

Frontier Drilling employee Jeremiah Larkin, wearing an orange survival suit, emerges from a submersible helicopter simulator at the Shell Robert Training and Conference Center, located east of Hammond. Mark Michaud, a diver with Montrose Safety Training, helps supervise the exercise for industry workers in an enclosed pool setting at the 20-acre training campus, where 30,000 people a year obtain oil and gas industry instruction. In this exercise, trainees were to stay in the simulator seven seconds after it submerged. Said Larkins, a Bastrop resident, ‘It was a long seven seconds.’

Drilling instructor Jeff Campbell, center, taps class members Tim Meyer, left, of the federal Minerals Management Service and Remy Daigneaul, a Shell offshore supervisor, to demonstrate how a class uses the drilling rig floor simulator in a well-control class at Shell’s Robert Training and Conference Center. The class included several students from Algeria in Africa, and Shell encourages other companies to train their oil and gas field and office workers at the center. In the past year, about 30 percent of the people training at the center were non-Shell personnel.

The training center uses cutaways on pieces like valves used to control the flow of hydrocarbons to help students better understand the equipment they use.