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...

The Measurement/Logging While Drilling (M/LWD) system is a kind of sensors system which is used to help oil/gas drilling field technicians to steer well drilling. In M/LWD, several kinds of sensors are installed into drill string to measure the underground logging data during well drilling operations, and a sink within the drill string collects the logging data from the sensors and then transmi...

It is common knowledge in the oil industry that the typical cost of drilling a new offshore well is in the range of $30-40 million, but the chance of that site being an economic success is 1 in 10. Recent advances in drilling technology and data collection methods have led to oil companies and their ancillary companies collecting large amounts of geophysical/geological data from production well...

To ensure safe and stable drilling operation, bottom hole pressure (BHP) should be kept within some region. However measurement of the BHP is sometimes not available or reliable, especially when the circulation is low, e.g., during pipe connection procedures. This paper presents the application of a moving horizon estimation (MHE) method for online estimation of the BHP during petroleum drillin...

Drilling operations of petroleum generate oily wastes. The disposal of a significant amount of oil-based drill muds has caused soil contamination and critical environmental impacts in the last decades.The current study aimed to investigate the potential of microbial remediation for an aged oil-based drilling waste and to monitor the fluctuation in microbial population throughout a ...

Logging while drilling (LWD) is a drilling technique which obtains and transmits the logging data during oil/gas drilling operations. Because of the limited available transmission bandwidth of mud channel, how to improve the bandwidth utilization becomes a critical problem in LWD research. In this paper, by discussing the information entropy of real logging data, we find that the original encod...

Piedmont tectonic belts are rich of oil and gas resources, however the intense tectonic stress and broken formation may cause great drilling problems in piedmont structures such as borehole collapse, lost circulation and gas cutting. Through analysis of in situ stress properties, bedding structure and mechanical characteristics, wellbore instability mechanism was expounded from rock mechanics, ...

Public health concerns related to the expansion of unconventional oil and gas drilling have sparked intense debate. In 2012, we published case reports of animals and humans affected by nearby drilling operations. Because of the potential for long-term effects of even low doses of environmental toxicants and the cumulative impact of exposures of multiple chemicals by multiple routes of exposure,...

The change from steerable motor to rotary steerable system has been both technically and commercially successful in Lybia. Through these case histories the paper will demonstrate benefits resulting from the use of rotary steerable systems that have led to a step change in overall drilling performance in the Middle East. This paper describes the successful introduction and application of a rotar...