Drilling automation is a rapidly growing area of information technology development. Efforts within automation are being undertaken by numerous and diverse organizations in the oil and gas industry, partly due to a desire for exploitation of marginal and complex fields, and partly in order to increase safety of high risk operations. As offshore drilling occurs in a unique work environment, orga...

With rapidly growing global demand for energy resources, oil and gas exploration & production companies face mounting pressure to maximize supply and increase the rate of discovery for new energy sources. Increasingly operating in more remote locations and investing heavily in equipment and facilities, companies face greater financial and operational risks than ever before. Optimization of dril...

Directional drilling has evolved over the last few decades to become standard operational practice in the oil and gas exploration industry. One method of steering utilizes a technique known as magnetic Measurement While Drilling (MWD). Vector measurements of geomagnetic fields along a well-bore are used to determine it orientation. This method is advantageous in that it is inexpensive and effic...

This paper presents a time-varying sliding mode adaptive controller in order to handle the stick-slip oscillation of nonlinear rotary drilling system. The time-varying sliding mode controller with strong robust has two time-varying sliding surfaces, one of them induced time-varying integral sliding mode control can control the transient stage of the rotary drilling system and ensure the system ...

An indicator of bypassing is a premature drop in gas-oil ratio; i.e., earlier than expected collapse of gas saturation. Early gas collapse (water fillup) may indicate that channeling has occurred. In layered reservoirs with no or little vertical crossflow, water injection in an initially depressurized layer will cause GOR to drop rapidly. Often naturally fractured reservoirs exhibit fast gas co...

Monitoring the flow rate out of the well is critical for good control of the downhole pressure in drilling operations. In this feasibility study, we explore the possibility of using a Venturi flume to provide a cost-effective measurement of the flow rate, with improved accuracy compared to conventional methods. A Venturi flume has been simulated both using CFD and a simplified 1D model. By prop...

This paper is concerned with optimal strategies for drilling in an oil exploration model. An exploration area contains n1 large and n2 small oilfields, where n1 and n2 are unknown, and represented by a two-dimensional prior distribution π. A single exploration well discovers at most one oilfield, and the discovery process is governed by some probabilistic law. Drilling a single well costs c, an...

This paper provides model-based estimates of the value of oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The best estimate of economically recoverable oil in the federal portion of ANWR is 7.06 billion barrels of oil, a quantity roughly equal to US consumption in 2005. The oil is worth $374 billion ($2005), but would cost $123 billion to extract and bring to market. The difference, $25...