| dc.description.abstract | Drilling is more experience-based than any other field in oil and gas industry. It involves many industry standards and regulations in order to enhance technical integrity. In addition, the best practices provide a system-wide reference for the engineers to plan as well as execute drilling and completion operations. If it is possible to transfer the experiences globally, the best practices and procedures can be even further improved. This approach is a paradigm shift from the tradition and can achieve the enormous enhancements in the drilling industry.
In this thesis, sidetracking activity is introduced to show the applicability of the experiences, regulations and industry standards for drilling operations. The method to sidetrack a wellbore, the required BHA design and operational parameters are established mainly by the experiences extracted from NTNU-governing documents and NORSOK Standards. Sidetracking from cement plug with the rotary steerable system, some experience-based recommendations and adjustments are concluded for our well model.
Moreover, the original and sidetracked well models are simulated in Landmark engineering programs. The well trajectories are designed in Compass, hydraulic as well as torque and drag programs are simulated in WellPlan, the casing designs are built in WellCat in order to check the safety of the well models and find critical results, which can threaten the operations. Furthermore, the risks in sidetracking and drilling operations are revealed and assessed based on the field experiences, where the risk levels are also reduced to the acceptable degree.
The observations of this research study indicate that the experience transfer is usually running smoothly in the same field. However, it is difficult to share the learned lessons among the different fields. Therefore, drilling organizations should be eager to incorporate and establish a simulator/experience transfer system that stores all industry standards and experiences in one database. In addition, the experience transfer system should have the capability to integrate with currently available software package in the company, which will make the system more user-friendly to find relevant standards and experiences.
Obviously, there will be challenges to find appropriate information out of the huge database in the experience transfer system. Thus, the system should have the well-organized search mechanism, which is another research study of this topic. | |
