Mitigating Drilling Dysfunction With a Drilling Advisory System

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This article, written by Special Publications Editor Adam Wilson, contains highlights of paper IPTC 18333, “Mitigating Drilling Dysfunction With a Drilling Advisory System: Results From Recent Field Applications,” by Gregory S. Payette, SPE, Darren Pais, SPE, Benjamin Spivey, SPE, and Lei Wang, SPE, ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company; Jeffrey R. Bailey, SPE, and Paul Pastusek, SPE, ExxonMobil Development Company; and Michael Owens, XTO Energy, prepared for the 2015 International Petroleum Technology Conference, Doha, Qatar, 7–9 December. The paper has not been peer reviewed. The ExxonMobil Drilling Advisory System (DAS) is a rig-based drilling-surveillance and -optimization platform that encourages regular drilloff tests, carefully monitors drilling performance, and provides recommendations for controllable drilling parameters to help improve the overall drilling process. Key technical components of the DAS include high-quality adaptive filtering algorithms for computing various drilling-system-performance measures, data-encapsulation/ dimensionality-reduction techniques, and reduced-order-modeling techniques that are ultimately used to generate recommendations for improved performance. Introduction Approximately a decade ago, the company initiated an internal program to pursue real-time rigsite mechanical-specific- energy (MSE) surveillance. MSE, a quantity initially developed and applied in the mining industry and subsequently applied to oilwell drilling, provides a measure of the energy required for a drilling assembly to drill through an interval of subterranean formation; and underefficient drilling conditions correlate with the compressive strength of the rock being drilled. It was quickly demonstrated that frequent drilloff tests using MSE trends to maximize drilling performance were an effective means of optimizing the drilling process. The basic idea was to use MSE trends to identify and respond to drilling-system- performance limiters such as bottomhole-assembly (BHA) whirl, bit balling, and stick/slip, with the ultimate goal of producing consistently better and longer bit runs. The initial program was deemed highly successful and since has become a key component of the rate-of-penetration (ROP) -optimization process.