Extended Reach Engineering Design
and Implementation Course
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Introduction
• Welcome to 5-Day Course
• Schedule
– 8:00 – 16:30 Monday – Thursday
– Happy Hour Wednesday
– 8:00 – 13:00 Friday
– Breaks every hour (roughly)
• Please turn cell phones OFF or to vibrate
• This is an informal setting – please ask questions.
• Have a great time!
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Course Objectives, Description, & Schedule 1
Course Objectives
• Improve understanding of high angle drilling
• Gain confidence in an engineering approach to drilling
• Be able to explain why certain practices worked (or
didn’t work) on previous wells
• Be able to anticipate when (and why) different
techniques may be required on future wells
• Experience fewer problems on future wells!
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Avoiding This…
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Course Objectives, Description, & Schedule 2
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Course Objectives, Description, & Schedule 3
Disaster Prevention
What causes most of the train wrecks?
• Mud?
• Iron?
• Lack of data?
• Or is it… People?
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Course Objectives, Description, & Schedule 4
The People Problem…
Wytch Farm Dry Hole Train Wrecks
40,000
What happened here? World record wells
• ≤25,000’ were being drilled relatively problem free
35,000
• 2 / 13Red
wells experienced
Denotes Train Wreck train wrecks before M11
Frequency = 8/20
• 5 / 6 wells experience train wrecks after M11
30,000
Horizontal Displacement,
25,000 “Changing of the Guard”
New technical and operations staff.
20,000 Lessons learned were not transferred.
Sidetracked to alternate
15,000
10,000
5,000
0
F 18 F 19 F 20 F 21 M1 M2 M3 M5 M6 M7 M8 M9 M 10 M 11 M 12 M 13 M 14 M 16 M 17 M 18
© K&M Technology Group - 2013
Drilling Order
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The Mind of a Driller
• Drillers tend to be skeptical
• Drillers tend to be resistant to change
• Drillers rely heavily on previous experiences
• Drillers struggle with the idea of non-linear behavior
10
Example: Here is some data…
9
Can you guess the y-value for an
8
x-value of “8”?
7
4 5 6
Pressure
Y Roughly “9”?
What if this was a leakoff test?
3
Was our initial experience relevant?
2
1
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Volume
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Course Objectives, Description, & Schedule 5
What’s Different about ERD
• “What’s Different” About ERD?
– Compared to vertical wells
– Compared to Low Angle Directional Wells
• When do things change?
– When does previous experience help?
– When does previous experience become a liability?
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Key Messages
• This course is primarily about Prevention
• 1 oz of Prevention > 1 lb of Cure
– (28.3 g of Prevention > 0.45 kg of Cure for the Canuks)
• Correct Preventative action is not always intuitive
– Intuition is often wrong, especially in deviated wells
• This course is not intended to reinforce
conventional wisdom
– In order to improve, things have to change…
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Course Objectives, Description, & Schedule 6
Key Messages
• Most Problems are Self-Inflicted
– Planning mistakes
– Practices mistakes
– Decision-making mistakes
Most wells don’t require a “big rig” or “new” technology. Simply correcting
mistakes is a big improvement on most wells!
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Key Messages
• Hole cleaning is often misunderstood
– We often don’t rotate fast enough
– We rarely circulate long enough
– Lots of misconceptions about sweeps, wiper trips, and mud
• Tripping practices are paramount
– …but we need to understand the fundamentals of hole cleaning first
– How we trip in a high-angle well is totally different than a vertical well
– Bad tripping practices are the kiss of death!
• Packoffs
• Wellbore instability (self-inflicted)
• Stuck pipe
• Lost BHA’s. loss of the hole, loss of the well
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Course Objectives, Description, & Schedule 7
Key Messages
• Annular Pressure is a Big Deal
– ECD, Surge, and Swab fluctuations are large in these wells
• Well design can dramatically minimizes (or maximize) these effects
– How to interpret what is going on requires more than just a PWD tool
• Conventional wisdom regarding PWD interpretation is wrong
– Certain operational practices can minimize pressure cycles on the hole
• “Listening to the Hole” requires some effort
– A little science clarifies what is happening below the rotary table
– When this is done properly, better decisions can be made in real-time
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Course Objectives, Description, & Schedule 8
