Drilling data quality control via wired drill pipe technology

Abstract

It is widely known that data associated with oil well drilling is often noisy and otherwise of bad quality. Bad data quality may be derived from mis-calibrated sensors/actuators, wrong data transmission or some faults in wells, etc. It is also known that solutions need to draw on people, processes and technologies to make traction. This paper addresses the challenges in measuring real-time downhole data and presents a method to extract downhole unmeasurable parameters via using the wired drill pipe (WDP) technology, which has gained industry acceptance as a viable alternative to typical logging while drilling (LWD) transmission methods and is being adopted with increasing frequency. An advanced data processing method, data validation and reconciliation (DVR) is applied to calibrate the WDP data and calculate the unmeasured drilling parameters by using the data redundancy of the system as the source of information. The ability of the DVR technology is not only to filter/remove the noise of the data, ensure the coherency of all sensors and models, but to put more emphasis on the accurate measurements and relax on inaccurate ones. Multiple measurements by several distributed sensors with WDP over time and under different conditions can be used to extract the crucial model parameters and correct the measurements. This scheme can further deal with sensor faults/redundancy and distinguish a sensor fault from drilling problems, a kick/lost or other unwanted events.