Interactive Drilling : the Up-To-Date Drilling Technology

Abstract

Drilling technologies have made much progress the last twenty years. In the past, many wells had to be drilled before and during the development of an oil field. The first wells were devoted to exploration and appraisal and the following ones to development of the oil field. Today, with horizontal drilling a common technique, wells with complex geometry can be drilled in a reservoir allowing the oil to be extracted from different places. Extended reach wells allow oil from remote locations to be reached. Furthermore, capitalizing on drilling is an efficient way to reduce the costs of appraisal, development and exploitation of an oil or gas field. Drilling is a unique opportunity to acquire data in order to take real time decisions leading to a global optimization of the drainage system. All the new technologies such as measurement while drilling, data acquisition, data transfer or high speed computing give the opportunity to provide the geologist, the reservoir engineer and the drilling engineer with more accurate information for taking better decisions. However new tools have to be designed to allow an optimized use of this information. Raw data must be transformed to high level of information so that decisions can be taken quickly with a low level of risk. However there is still the need to perform real-time economic evaluation of the well so that the decisions to drill one meter more can be also taken on economic simulations. In this revue, different techniques to generate high quality information from drilling data will be discussed. Some results issued from research projects managed by IFP and its partners will be addressed.