The accurate control of the wellbore pressure not only prevents lost circulation/blowout and fracturing formation by managing the density of the drilling fluid, but also improves productivity by mitigating reservoir damage. Calculating the geothermal pressure of a geothermal well by constant parameters would easily bring big errors, as the changes of physical, rheological and thermal properties...

control of well drilling operations poses a challenging issue to be tackled. the loss of well control could lead to the occurrence of blowout as a severe threat, involving the risk of human lives and environmental and economic consequences. conventional proportional-integral (pi) controller is a common practice in the well control operation. the small existing margin between pore pressure and f...

This paper provides model-based estimates of the value of oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The best estimate of economically recoverable oil in the federal portion of ANWR is 7.06 billion barrels of oil, a quantity roughly equal to US consumption in 2005. The oil is worth $374 billion ($2005), but would cost $123 billion to extract and bring to market. The difference, $25...

North Carolina has no history of large-scale commercial oil and gas extraction, and the state’s legis la tive framework for regulating drilling was, until recently, based on laws passed in the 1940s. However, areas of the state are likely to undergo hori zontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and oil in the near future. North Carolina thus has a unique opportunity to produce a...

Solids control equipment at the rig site is used to remove rock cuttings or low-gravity solids (LGS) from drilling fluids to allow the fluid to return to the active system in a re-usable condition. Typical equipment, such as shakers and centrifuges, remove LGS particles greater than 5-7 microns. Build up of finer solids in the fluid can create problems for efficient drilling such as drillpipe s...

I investigate the importance of learning in oil and gas exploration. I developed a tractable dynamic structural model of oil and gas exploration in which firms gradually learn about the productive qualities of different regions through exploratory drilling. Exploratory drilling is modelled as an information-gathering process in which each new exploratory well provides information concerning the...

A 5,000-m-long, 15-in (38-cm) outer-diameter, full-scale pipe was deployed from the large Moon Pool of the Hughes Glomar Explorer (Fig. 1) while a deep-ocean mining system operated from the ship in the North Pacific Ocean in 1976 and 1979. From the standpoint of design as well as operation, one of the most critical parameters in deep-ocean mining and deep-ocean drilling is the behavior of the p...

The oil well drilling process is the selected representative of a challenging industrial process. The drilling process is becoming more complex as oil fields mature and technology evolves. At the same time, the amount of information is increasing in volume and frequency. Although technology is advancing, failures occur at almost the same rate as before, leading to loss of valuable time. Wheneve...

Hydraulics play an important function in many oil field operations including drilling, completion, fracturing, acidizing, workover and production. The standard API methods for drilling fluid hydraulics assume either power law or Bingham plastic rheological model. These models and corresponding hydraulic calculations do provide a simple way for fair estimates of hydraulics for conventional verti...