Comprehensive Review of Damages and Repairs on Drill Pipe Connections

Abstract

Abstract In the last two decades the drilling industry has experienced major changes in both drillpipe connections and related inspection criteria. Many operators and contractors now regularly use premium drill pipe connections to drill all sections of their wells. One result of this is that the drilling community is often surprised by the amount of post-well drillpipe repairs that are required. There is little or no established statistical data available to budget repairs in any given well program. Instead they have been left to guess how much to budget into a given drilling project. This paper will review data from two inspection databases containing in excess of 200,000 joints of drill pipe. The records were derived from operational data obtained from several years of drill pipe inspection. The databases contain inspection records for premium, double shoulder and API connections. The paper will discuss how different inspection standards, premium connections, etc. can affect the "damages" at the end of the drilling program. The objective of the paper is to provide planning factors to the drilling community in order to provide a basis for budgeting repair costs and to highlight the impact of connection selection and inspection standards on repairs.