Interactive Drilling for Fast Track Oilfield Development

Description

These are the proceedings of the conference held in Rueil-Malmaison, November 9, 1999 addressing a theme that is of great strategic importance, and represents a major industrial challenge to the entire petroleum industry. To accelerate the development of oil fields, it is vital to minimize the time between the discovery of a field and when it goes into production. This means that new strategies for the development of oil fields must be implemented, including the establishment of far closer ties with the reserve assessment stage. This approach, known as “fast track development”, opens up new prospects for drilling and hence, new technological challenges. The aim of interactive drilling is to remove geological uncertainties while drilling progresses, so as to better direct the well itself to the production zones. This involves completely re-thinking the interactive procedures that link drilling measurements to the geological models or reservoirs that were the starting point for scheduling the well drilling. The results of this work will considerably influence the technical program that is adopted for drilling wells in the future. This development will be appreciated to its full extent with the exploration of deep and very deep offshore fields, where rates of return are always linked to maximized recovery and production. Content:• Front Matter • Table of Contents • 1. Opening Address 2. Smart Drilling: Both Technological and Cultural Revolutions for the Oil Industry 3. Well Data Acquisition Strategies 4. Geosteering Opportunities 5. Achieving and Maintaining Improved Drilling Performance in the Tectonically Stressed Andean Foothills of Colombia 6. Wellbore Stability: One of the Most Important Engineering Challenges When Drilling Smart Wells 7. Interactive Drilling: The Fastest Way from Reservoir to Production • 8. Synthesis of the Round Table Discussions