SPE Drilling & Completion
Volume 25,
Number 3,
September 2010,
pp. 336-345
Summary
Automatic control solutions for drilling are expected to become widely used
in the future. Both basic and more advanced control tools are well established
in other communities such as offshore processing facilities and oil refineries.
Drilling systems, however, have traditionally been operated manually. There is
a great economic potential for the introduction of automatic control providing
reduced drilling time, increased regularity, and improved performance,
especially for wells with very narrow pressure margins. One example of
automated drilling is automatic control of the downhole pressure by topside
choking in managed-pressure-drilling (MPD) operations. Narrow drilling margins,
especially in depleted reservoirs, ask for highly accurate pressure
control.
Statoil applied automatic MPD successfully offshore at the Kvitebjørn field
in the North Sea in 2007. This paper presents some MPD results from Kvitebjørn
and discusses automatic control requirements for drilling operations. The
requirements for MPD operations include a specified accuracy for a set of
normal operations, such as rate changes and set point ramping during
connections, surge and swab, and some failure operations, such as power loss,
gas kicks, and blocked choke. The paper also includes some ideas for the future
of intelligent-drilling operations with increasing automation.
© 2010. Society of Petroleum Engineers
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History
- Original manuscript received:
4 December 2008
- Meeting paper published:
18 March 2009
- Revised manuscript received:
31 August 2009
- Manuscript approved:
11 November 2009
- Published online:
15 April 2010
- Version of record:
13 September 2010
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