Planning has always been essential to create and maintain a safe drilling environment. Safety and environmental concerns are now a larger concern than ever before with the increasing difficulty in drilling projects and the more sensitive environmental areas that wells are being constructed and produced from. This is increasingly becoming a bigger concern with the potential opening of new offshore and onshore areas that have been until recently not accessible to exploration and production primarily from an environmental aspect or proximity to large population centers.Using an open-to-the-atmosphere fluids returns system when drilling with hazardous, or any, drilling fluids or into formations that could potentially have high concentrations of toxic gases or unknown shallow geo hazards, raises significant health, safety and environmental concerns. These hazards along with the complex wells with tight margins between pore pressure and fracture gradient increase risk to an intolerable level. Of course these issues have to be considered while still maintaining the same constraints of minimizing cost and enhancing drilling performance.Managed Pressure Drilling (MPD) is a methodology that has been developed and practiced over the past few years with great success to aid in the mitigation of known and unknown drilling hazards. MPD utilizes conventional techniques and technologies to create a closed and pressurizable drilling fluids returns system that works to better predict and control the reactions of the formation to the drilling program. Planning a well with MPD as an option will preserve the same conventional drilling methods and controls but give knowledge and the technology to better mitigate against hazards and more securely maintain well control. This paper will describe the processes and variations, and the technologies used with MPD. It will further detail how MPD techniques are applied to a variety of operations to increase both drilling efficiencies and the overall safety of the operation.
The global demand for oil and gas is continually growing, while the world's resources are becoming increasing more difficult to obtain as the less problematic and operationally straightforward prospects dwindle. A majority of the industry's efforts are being spent in the identification and development of new methods and technologies to enable access and production from these resources where accessibility is technically challenging and hazardous due to difficult drilling environments or geological hazards, or both. At the same time, health, safety and environmental risks are more of a concern than ever before. Exposure to these difficulties is even more evident and challenging in offshore operations where not only the technical problems exist, but now logistics becomes a bigger issue.Over the past several years, significant advancements have been made towards methodologies and technologies that allow for better control and management of downhole and surface pressure during the drilling and completions of onshore and offshore wells. The technology advancements and lessons learned through the evolution of Managed Pressure Drilling (MPD) techniques are now being utilized to increase safety and drilling operation's efficiencies, and allowing for access of previously inaccessible reserves. MPD is being used as a mitigating technology to eliminate non-productive time (NPT) problems, such as time spent during kick-loss scenarios and reduction of well costs by minimizing the number of casing strings. For many projects, MPD has become the enabling technology that permits feasibility of drilling and completion of the prospect. This paper will describe the processes and variations, and the technologies used with MPD. It will further detail how MPD techniques are being applied as an enabling technology to a variety of onshore and offshore operations to increase the safety of rig crew and surrounding environment and overcome the problems associated with today's challenging wells.
The number one operational safety risk during the drilling and completion of a well is the risk of a kick becoming uncontrollable and the danger that can place on people, assets and environment. Another risk is the potential misdiagnosis of a kick and the ability to quickly and efficiently identify downhole anomalies. Is it a kick, or is the wellbore breathing when making a connection? Are we experiencing losses, or is the wellbore ballooning when the mud pumps are turned back on after a connection is made? If a wrong decision is made based on a misdiagnosed situation, the results can range from costing millions of dollars in nonproductive time to loss of life and rig.There are numerous key technology elements in the industry today that can greatly mitigate these risks and create a substantially safer drilling and completion operation and environment. These elements are field-proven over 40 plus years, are readily available from many vendors and are relatively economical. Surprisingly, these elements are not used on the most critical, risk-laden and expensive wells being drilled globally. These risk-mitigating elements include such systems as rotating control devices, flow-metering technologies, automated drilling choke systems, and downhole isolation valves. Individually these elements add incremental benefits and increase the overall safety of the drilling and completion operations. When these systems are paired or used in combination with each other to create a closed and pressurizable mud-returns system, the benefits escalate exponentially when compared to cost or perceived inconveniences of these elements. Furthermore, when the closed-loop system is designed as such -a system -as opposed to being piecemealed together, the operational benefits of the system are maximized. This paper describes how a few of these basic elements greatly enhance operational safety and efficiency. A closed mud-returns system will allow us to identify kicks and losses quickly and accurately, thereby minimizing risk, without sacrificing other operational elements.
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