MANAGED
PRESSURE
DRILLING
BACKGROUND
In deepwater drilling, narrow "pressure windows" wreak major havoc: even small over or under-pressures are detrimental to safety. Offshore success requires knowing and controlling pressure at the drillbit at all times. In the past decade, hardware advances have revolutionized operations, making deep wells a practical reality. But the math models and algorithms needed for predictive modeling and feedback-control systems were lacking.
In 2009, Stratamagnetic Software, LLC, in response to a United States Department of Energy Request for Proposal, won a significant contract to develop this technology - no small accomplishment since the competition included major oil service companies. The work, building on efforts described in "Fluid Rheology," culminated in Managed Pressure Drilling: Modeling, Strategy and Planning in 2012 by Elsevier Scientific Publishing and its 2016 translation into Chinese for Asian audiences.
TECHNOLOGY
The algorithms solved the most general problem relevant to drilling and cementing. Arbitrary pump schedules (different non-Newtonian fluids, pumping different durations at different flow rates) were allowed. Also permitted were high yield stresses; steady and transient effects; general reciprocation, rotation and drill ahead; borehole curvature and highly eccentric annuli (with cuttings beds, fractures and washouts); and coupled pipe and annular effects. The models could be used in hole cleaning and pressure prediction, in fact, anywhere at anytime along the borehole; and they were applicable to cementing operations as well, where they guide our understanding of displacement efficiencies. The implications were astounding.
Just years ago, for example, the swab-surge application suggested above would not be possible: one allowing high eccentricity, rotation, general pipe movement (with and without circulation), arbitrary pump schedules. Today, new and powerful capabilities are hosted by rapid and numerically stable calculations, user-friendly graphical user interfaces, integrated color graphics (with movies), and automatic report generation.
Not just "another pretty face," our math models are carefully derived, validated and explained, ready for immediate off-the-shelf application or for integration in corporate host systems. Importantly, our technology is not protected by patents - all underlying theories are available as a service for petroleum industry use and described in our books.
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