Currently, part of the Eastern Siberia fields is transforming to the latest step of the extraction process by slowly depleting the payzone with intensive production and turning it into an unconventional resources oilfield. In such a case, formation drilling fluid quality is part of the initial plan. Traditional drilling methods with only one horizontal borehole no longer achieves targets in unconventional oil and gas production. Drilling multilateral wells captures all oil-bearing layers in the production target area, not just content from an edge formation from the perspective of conventional drilling. A non-damaging in-situ formation drilling fluid was developed for use in the Vankor oilfield, the top priority oilfield for Rosneft in Eastern Siberia. Production drilling was started in 2006 and a growing rate of drilling is increasing each year by up to 15-20%, which is the one of the largest across Russia. The paper fully describes the methods of drilling fluid selection, the evaluation of mud formulation, the laboratory study with cutting and cores, and the economic effects on the oilfield with drilling of multilateral sections in the Vankor oilfield.
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