The drilling rig stands tall amid the hills of western Oklahoma. There's serious business going on here: Skilled workers are tending the machinery, pulling up long pipes that are stacked neatly at the base of the rig and threading them deftly into the ever-deepening shaft. The sound of the operation is deafening, mixing the whine of three electrical generators and the occasional squeal of metal rubbing against metal.You can tell who does what by the color of the hard-hat. The white hardhats work for Marathon Oil, which owns this site. The 30-some green hardhats are visitors—green means greenhorn—part of a delegation of students and professors from the University of Texas Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering. They are here as part of Camp Bevo, a weeklong program intended to give second-year students a feel for what it's really like to work in the oil business. For most of them, it's the first time they've been so close to an oil rig going full tilt.
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