Kick Tolerance is an important factor in the industry, that allows drilling engineers to establish several parameters in the development phase of a well, such as casing depths, open hole lengths, etc. It can also be considered a valuable safety factor to prevent well control problems.Several different definitions and calculation approaches were found for this term, and when you have something as dynamic and fast-paced as it is the oil & gas industry it is an important issue, since this lack of standardization leads to confusion and miscommunication.In chapter 3 and 4 the current calculation method, industry approach and knowledge of the term is quickly reviewed. Different kick tolerance software was analyzed in order to outline assumptions, compare results and calculation methodologies. Two main groups were distinguished: VBA macros for Microsoft Excel and standalone applications. The software presented in this work is developed in an attempt to overcome the main difficulties and disadvantages found during the initial analysis of the previously mentioned programs. Well: “Thesis work”, analyzed in chapter 5, presents real data from an exploration well that, when planned, was expected to be an easy to accomplish task by the drilling crew, not at all troublesome. In the original analysis, pre-development, an extremely high kick tolerance was found (≈90bbl or ≈15 m3), and drilling and casing designs were made accordingly. Operations for the 8.5” section where estimated to last 5 – 8 days with a specific budget. Several small kicks were presented during the drilling operations, and about 100m before TD was reached, a gas kick occurred, even though the original analysis showed a high margin before trouble was supposed to be encounter, once killing operations started, it became clear that control was not going to be easily regained, ultimately leading to the abandonment well.Many different reasons could have led to this much trouble, i.e. using data from nearby wells without later updating this information with the real data found for this specific well, not taking into consideration all the factors involved on the calculation, etc. This would have helped readjust different parameters before the incident happened, with high probabilities of a different, and more positive, outcome.

With the increasing number of drilled ultra-extended reach wells and complex geometry wells, the drilling limitation caused by excessive torque and drag forces must be further investigated. The wellbore friction being a main limiting factor in extended reach well needs to be studied with the new developed models.This master thesis presents an application of the new 3-dimentional analytical model developed by Bernt S. Aadnøy in the synthetic test and four real wells. Quite diverse wellbore trajectory and depth has been chosen for a better evaluation and comparison of the model with the measured data. In order to investigate the potential and limitation of the model, torque and drag analysis during the different operations such as tripping in, tripping out, rotating off bottom, combined up/down were investigated. An application of the analytical model for wellbore friction analysis in the actual wells is very time consuming and requires a lot data/input manipulation. As a part of the thesis assignment, it was required to create simplified means for application and testing the analytical model. With visual basic application in Excel a simple torque and drag simulator was created purely based on the analytical model simple solution. Along with the analytical model the master thesis includes Wellplan software for torque and drag analysis in all the included test and actual wells. Along with this, the project has a brief literature study of 3D analytical model and torque and drag concept in general. The analytical model gives a reasonable torque and drag results. Based on comparison between the model and actual measurement, it has been observed that the analytical model simple solution in some cases may not precisely describe wellbore friction analysis. The discrepancy between Wellplan and the analytical model prediction occurs during the tripping in operations. Being a strong function of tension/compression in the drill string the analytical model for more accurate torque and drag prediction requires an application of the complete solution. The main challenge for this model is the complexity of its full application. There is an uncertainty regarding the model application in conjunction with drillstring effective tension. For the actual well application it is time consuming and requires drillstring effective tension analyzing which make the model disable for the real time analysis.The analytical model must be further investigated by application in the real well with good quality of measured data.

To determine the carrying capacity of the drilling fluid, also determine the settling velocities of the drilling cuttlings. To produce the Reynold's number experimentally.

Designing a fit-for-purpose drilling fluid for high-pressure, high-temperature (HP/HT) operations is one of the greatest technological challenges facing the oil and gas industry today. Typically, a drilling fluid is subjected to increasing temperature and pressure with depth. While higher temperature decreases the drilling fluid’s viscosity due to thermal expansion, increased pressure increases its viscosity by compression. Under these extreme conditions, well control issues become more complicated and can easily be masked by methane and hydrogen sulfide solubility in oil-base fluids frequently used in HP/HT operations. Also current logging tools are at best not reliable since the anticipated bottom-hole temperature is often well above their operating limit. The Literature shows limited experimental data on drilling fluid properties beyond 350°F and 20,000 psig. The practice of extrapolation of fluid properties at some moderate level to extreme-HP/HT (XHP/HT) conditions is obsolete and could result in significant inaccuracies in hydraulics models. This research is focused on developing a methodology for testing drilling fluids at XHP/HT conditions using an automated viscometer. This state-of-the-art viscometer is capable of accurately measuring drilling fluids properties up to 600°F and 40,000 psig. A series of factorial experiments were performed on typical XHP/HT oil-based drilling fluids to investigate their change in rheology at these extreme conditions (200 to 600°F and 15,000 to 40,000 psig). Detailed statistical analyses involving: analysis of variance, hypothesis testing, evaluation of residuals and multiple linear regression are implemented using data from the laboratory experiments. I have developed the FluidStats program as an effective statistical tool for characterizing drilling fluids at XHP/HT conditions using factorial experiments. Results from the experiments show that different drilling fluids disintegrate at different temperatures depending on their composition (i.e. weighting agent, additives, oil/water ratio etc). The combined pressure-temperature effect on viscosity is complex. At high thresholds, the temperature effect is observed to be more dominant while the pressure effect is more pronounced at low temperatures. This research is vital because statistics show that well control incident rates for non- HP/HT wells range between 4% to 5% whereas for HP/HT wells, it is as high as 100% to 200%. It is pertinent to note that over 50% of the world’s proven oil and gas reserves lie below 14,000 ft subsea according to the Minerals Management Service (MMS). Thus drilling in HP/HT environment is fast becoming a common place especially in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) where HP/HT resistant drilling fluids are increasingly being used to ensure safe and successful operations.

Dual Gradient Drilling is an exciting technology which promises to solve the current technical hurdles and economic risks of Deepwater Drilling. Several techniques for Dual Gradient Drilling have been proposed to the industry. One such method involves installing a subsea booster pump at the seafloor with the aim of returning the drilling fluid back to the rig. The pump will manage annular pressures in the wellbore as circulation rates and mud weights vary and will permit early detection of wellbore influxes. Any such pump chosen to achieve this objective will be subjected to very high differential pressures and will be faced with the onerous task of lifting very abrasive and viscous mud slurries from the sea floor back to the drilling rig. This distance in deep water may be well within the range of about 4, 000 – 12,000 feet depending on the operating water depth of the rig. Several pump technologies available to the industry were examined. Piston pumps are very efficient and can withstand the high differential pressures encountered in the Mudlift Drilling System. However, their drawbacks are their large size and weight and high initial capital cost and maintenance costs. Centrifugal pumps on the other hand are relatively smaller than piston and diaphragm pumps and are generally less expensive. Disc pumps, with their non-impingement design are able to handle solids and fluids with a high gas volume fraction but, like centrifugal pumps, are generally less efficient than reciprocating pumps. Diaphragm pumps are capable of maintaining a constant rate regardless of pressure fluctuations. They can handle very abrasive solids with limited wear on the pump. They also excel at handling very viscous fluids and they can be modified to handle up to 95% gas volume fraction. Like piston pumps, they have very high efficiencies. The potential of each of these pump technologies to meet the requirements for the Mudlift Drilling System was examined in this thesis. The benefits and drawbacks of each of these pump technologies were highlighted and modifications to meet the demands of the mudlift system evaluated.

The main goal of drilling a horizontal well is to enhance productivity or injectory by placing a long distance drain-hole within the pay-zone. Poor drilling fluid design results in difficulties such as poor hole cleaning, excessive torque or drag, wellbore instability, stuck drill string, loss of circulation, subsurface pressure control, poor cement jobs, and difficulties associated with running electric logs and formation damage can result. Neither of the conventional chemical cleaning methods can overcome problems for filter-cake removal in long horizontal and maximum reservoir contact wells because of limitations such as the complex geometry of wells, non-uniform chemical distribution, low contact between cleaning fluids/filter cake, and high chemical reaction rate, especially at high temperatures. This study describes a novel self-destructing drilling fluid system. Filter cakes are formed from a formula of drilling fluid that have a mixture of solid acid precursor and particulate solid acid-reactive materials. Then in the presence of water, the solid acid precursor (polylactic acid) hydrolyzes and dissolves, generating acids that then dissolve the solid acid-reactive materials (calcite). It effectively stimulates the horizontal section right after drilling and eliminates acidizing, resulting in significant cost savings, and improves filter-cake removal, thus enhancing the performance of the treated wells. A series of experiments have been run in the lab to determine the efficiency of this new system. Properties of this drilling fluid are measured. Experiments on solid acid particle size showed that the best size-distribution of solid acid precursor and solid reactive material to make a self-destructing filter cake is fine particles of calcium carbonate used as weighting material with 150 microns polylactic acid as solid acid precursor. By comparison of the results of the experiments at different temperatures, 230 degrees F has been chosen as the best temperature for running experiments. The self-destructing drilling fluid systems need enough time for the solid acid to be hydrolyzed and therefore remove the filter cake. After 20 hours of contact with the water as the only cleaning solution, about 80 percent of the filter cake was removed. Calcite is found to be the dominant compound in the sample of remained filter cake, which was proved by x-ray diffraction tests. Secondary electron microscopy (SEM) results show the morphology of the remained filter cake sample and confirm the crystalline area of calcite.

Abstract In this thesis, the variation of the natural frequencies of a drill during the high speed drilling processes has been investigated. The Pro-E and MARC finite element packages were used to formulate the twisted drills. Two numerical methods,i.e. Lanczos and Inverse Power Sweep, have been employed to solve the corresponding eigen value problems.The effects of following parameters,e.g. drilling speed,axial load and drilling conditions on the natural frequencies of a drill was simulated numerically and measured experimentally. Four springs with different spring stiffness attached on the drill tip is used to simulate the drill as it penetrated into the workpiece. The variation of the drilling responses under different drilling speeds have been measured. Results indicate the measured results agree very well with the measured data.Frequency spectrum distributions indicate the drilling frequency and the twice drilling frequency are the key response frequency of the axial thrust force, and the drill of frequencyisthe only key frequency which dominates the torque response.Experimental results also show the thrust forces estimated from the empirical equation have good correlation with these measured data.

Quantifying infill potential in marginal oil fields often involves several challenges. These include highly heterogeneous reservoir quality both horizontally and vertically, incomplete reservoir databases, considerably large amounts of data involving numerous wells, and different production and completion practices. The most accurate way to estimate infill potential is to conduct a detailed integrated reservoir study, which is often time-consuming and expensive for operators of marginal oil fields. Hence, there is a need for less-demanding methods that characterize and predict heterogeneity and production variability. As an alternative approach, various authors have used empirical or statistical analyses to model variable well performance. Many of the methods are based solely on the analysis of well location, production and time data. My objective is to develop an enhanced method for rapid assessment of infill-drilling potential that would combine increased accuracy of simulation-based methods with times and costs associated with statistical methods. My proposed solution is to use reservoir simulation combined with automatic history matching to regress production data to determine the permeability distribution. Instead of matching on individual cell values of reservoir properties, I match on constant values of permeability within regions around each well. I then use the permeability distribution and an array of automated simulation predictions to determine infill drilling potential throughout the reservoir. Infill predictions on a single-phase synthetic case showed greater accuracy than results from statistical techniques. The methodology successfully identified infill well locations on a synthetic case derived from Cut Bank field, a water-flooded oil reservoir. Analysis of the actual production and injection data from Cut Bank field was unsuccessful, mainly because of an incomplete production database and limitations in the commercial regression software I used. In addition to providing more accurate results than previous empirical and statistical methods, the proposed method can also incorporate other types of data, such as geological data and fluid properties. The method can be applied in multiphase fluid situations and, since it is simulation based, it provides a platform for easy transition to more detailed analysis. Thus, the method can serve as a valuable reservoir management tool for operators of stripper oil fields.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2009. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 44 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 34-35).

Thesis (M.Sc.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2001. / Bibliography: leaves 80-94.