Reusing past experiences by reasoning from past cases poses particular problems when the input to case retrieval comes from large amounts of online data. Volve has developed a system in which data from oil well drilling logs are continuously monitored, interpreted, and used to check if previous incidents exist that may predict an unwanted event to happen unless preventive actions are taken. The...

In this paper we present DrillEdge a commercial and award winning software system that monitors oil-well drilling operations in order to reduce non-productive time (NPT). DrillEdge utilizes case-based reasoning with temporal representations on streaming real-time data, pattern matching and agent systems to predict problems and give advice on how to mitigate the problems. The methods utilized, t...

The natural convection flow over a surface embedded in saturated porous media is encountered in many engineering problems such as the design of pebble-bed nuclear reactors, ceramic processing, crude oil drilling, geothermal energy conversion, use of fibrous material in the thermal insulation of buildings, catalytic reactors and compact heat exchangers, heat transfer from storage of agricultural...

The proposals have also drawn anger from the energy industry. Kathleen Sgamma, a director of the Western Energy Alliance, which represents 400 oil and natural-gas companies, said the new policy could block some promising lands from drilling. “They’re treating lands arbitrarily as de facto wildernesses,” she said. And Dean Heller, a Republican representative from Nevada, said: “The message of th...

We present an adaptive observer design for a first-order hyperbolic system of Partial Differential Equations with uncertain boundary parameters. The design relies on boundary measurements only, and is based on a backstepping approach. Using a Gradient Descent technique, we prove exponential convergence of the distributed system and estimation of the parameter. This method is applied to the esti...

Risk ranking of Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) for gas and oil wells is a key criterion in the project feasibility, pricing and for introducing a risk management strategy that aims to reduce the number of failures in the installation phase and its negative consequences. HDD is currently widely used in drilling wells in Iran, but research in the area of identification and risks ranking of...

As oil and gas production moves to ever more challenging areas, increased use of technology becomes increasingly important. One technology that can contribute towards achieving safe and economic production from such areas is computer-aided process engineering. We outline the use of such technology in two (of many) instances: Managed pressure drilling (MPD) for deep-offshore applications and nat...

Quadrupole mass spectrometry (QMS) is regularly used for online monitoring of gaseous systems. With the advent of miniature QMS, it is possible to apply this capability to the analysis of gas samples extracted from drilling mud during exploration and development of oil and gas fields. QMS analysis can provide rapid compositional data for a range of hydrocarbons, providing early recognition of p...

Recently, a renewed interest arises in the application of nanotechnology for the upstream petroleum industry. In particular, adding nanoparticles to fluids may drastically benefit enhanced oil recovery and improve well drilling, by changing the properties of the fluid, rocks wettability alteration, advanced drag reduction, strengthening the sand consolidation, reducing the inter-facial tension and...