An important question with respect to the Deepwater Horizon accident is whether the accident is a symptom of systemic safety problems in the deepwater drilling industry. An answer to such a question is hard to obtain unless the risk level related to major accident prevention, preparedness, and responses of the oil and gas industry is measured and evaluated over time. In this paper, we present i...

Gas turbines are considered as one kind of the most important devices in power engineering and have been widely used in power generation, airplanes, and naval ships and also in oil drilling platforms. However, they are monitored without man on duty in the most cases. It is highly desirable to develop techniques and systems to remotely monitor their conditions and analyze their faults. In this w...

Crude oil is a naturally generated material comprising a very complex mixture of coexisting hydrocarbons and polar organic compounds. It is found in geologic formations below the Earth's surface and recovered mostly through oil drilling. It is refined and separated by distillation according to the various boiling points of the components resulting in a number of products, such as petrol, kerose...

This paper proposes the use of a hybrid approach to perform the trajectory control in the oil drilling industry using Rotary Steerable Systems (RSS). Two levels of automation are proposed, the attitude control (Level 1) regulating inclination and azimuth downhole and the outer loop (Level 2), that monitors the performance of the inner loop and controls the directional drilling commands issued t...

In the recent years horizontal drilling (HD) has become increasingly important in oil and gas exploration because it can increase the production per well and can effectively rework old and marginal vertical wells. The key element of successful HD is accurate navigation of the drill bit with advanced measurement-while-drilling (MWD) tools. The size of the MWD tools is not significantly restricte...

In this study, predictive capabilities of apparent viscosity of oil-based drilling fluids which is used in National Iranian South Oilfields Company (NISOC) were evaluated using Newtonian and non-Newtonian models to drive a new suitable equation. The non-Newtonian models include Bingham plastic, Power law, Herschel-Bulkley, Casson, and Robertson-Stiff. To validate the results, the calculated vis...

Conditions of work on offshore drilling platforms are particularly hard due to extreme environmental situations created both by nature and technological processes. Oil drilling workers employed on the open sea are potentially exposed to permanently high stress. Apart from the obvious objective factors affecting drilling platform employees, a great role in the general work-related stress level i...