Mason

Drilling & Completion / September 2007 Volume 22 Issue No. 3

EE Editorial:

A question I was asked recently is “How do Health, Safety and Environmental (HSE) issues fit into technical journals like SPE Drilling & Completion, or into any of the other SPE publications?”

            For many of us, HSE issues are an important daily focus and year on year they become a bigger part of the working day. We see more thorough and systematic incident investigations, wider circulations of workplace incident reports, and there is more visibility of lessons learned. With HSE being an integral part of everyone’s business, how should technical journals like SPEDC embrace HSE issues? The answer, I think, is that almost every paper already does embrace HSE issues; therefore, the question is more about the individual’s interpretation of the term “HSE issues”.

            Taking a narrower perspective of HSE, the latest statistics on incidents and near misses, safety flashes, investigation reports, wellsite initiatives or changes to competency qualifications do not really fit into a technical journal such as SPEDC. However, a wider (and I think better) perspective is that HSE issues encompass anything we do to improve the efficiency of our drilling and completion business. Taking a wider perspective, striving for continuous improvement in HSE performance can be seen as a foundation for almost everything we do. Improved efficiency means more accurate and accessible information, fewer people on wellsites, less waste discharged, fewer unplanned events, fewer equipment failures, fewer and more productive wells, less energy to construct each well, fewer interventions, more reliable completions for life of the field and more reliable abandonments for life of the planet.

            This edition offers you eight peer-reviewed technical papers, all of which speak to improved drilling and completion efficiency and so to improved HSE performance.

            How does HSE relate to a technical paper about improvements in drilling fluids? Deepwater Drilling Made More Efficient and Cost-Effective Using the Microflux Control Method and an Ultralow Invasion Fluid to Open the Mud-Weight Window. A drilling fluid with better fluid loss control and better rheology control will contribute to fewer well control incidents for a narrow pore-frac gradient wellbore. This means improvements in safety.

            Establishing better industry standards to allow more confidence in apples-for-apples comparisons of drilling fluid performance is presented in Modernization of the API Recommended Practice on Rheology and Hydraulics: Creating Easy Access to Integrated Wellbore Fluids Engineering. Better standards provide a more robust basis for engineering the optimum drilling fluids for a well and helping to deliver more productive wells with improved wellsite safety.

            Losing a high cost BHA and then spending the extra rig time for sidetracking is costly, hazardous, and inefficient. Sidetracking also results in unpleasant problems like handling swarf from section milling, nuclear sources left downhole and high doglegs. Losing a hole section is still too frequent and anything to help reduce well bore problems gives a direct benefit to HSE performance. A Rapid, Rigsite-Deployable, Electrochemical Test for Evaluating the Membrane Potential of Shales aims to reduce the occurrence of well bore stability problems.

            Use of Real-Time Rig Sensor Data to Improve Daily Drilling Reporting, Benchmarking and Planning—A Case Study looks at improving the value of drilling data to better diagnose, understand, and improve drilling performance. The point is well made that vast amounts of data are available, but typically, little is done with the data.   Pressure Prediction and Drilling Challenges in a Deepwater Subsalt Well from Offshore Nova Scotia, Canada shows how the understanding of uncertainty in key subsurface data has a direct influence on well design, drilling practices, and well site safety.             

Sandface Completion for a Shallow Laminated Gas Pay with High Fines Content presents techniques that have improved well productivity in a challenging reservoir’s architecture. In such fields, sandface completion design can be the most important lever to unlock reserves and so enable commercial field developments.  

            Optimization of Well Performance in a Selective Subsea Sand-Control Completion, Offshore Nigeria provides a second example of understanding well productivity problems and delivering improvements to commercial value and HSE performance.  

            Marco Polo Tension Leg Platform: Deepwater Completion Performance presents a variety of best practice activities in the delivery of deepwater completions.

            I encourage you to digest the one or two papers that most interest you, think about how the information might improve the efficiency of your business, and use the spe.org online discussion forum to ask the authors for any clarifications or further details. As always, comments are welcome; John.mason2@bp.com.