Automated Drilling -

Automated Drilling

During well construction, the drilling rig is mainly manually operated by the drilling crew. The main challenge is to drill and complete the well with maximum safety for the crew and the environment and in a minimum of time.

Drilling operations are becoming more challenging, since the petroleum reserves now being discovered and developed often are located in formations and at depths that are difficult to access. Typical challenges are caused by well bore stability problems, formation pressure conditions and remote location, such as artic areas or deep waters.

Further developement of existing fields have also shown to be challenging, since drilling into mature and often depleted formations may be difficult due to tight pressure margins. When drilling into such a formations it is critical to maintain the required downhole pressure to avoid well bore fracture or influx of petroleum fluids.

To compensate for these drilling challenges, new pump systems, seals and choke valves have been introduced to allow for improved pressure control during drilling, often referred to as managed pressure drilling. In addition, new instrumentation systems are also being taken into use, both topside and downhole. However, as the pump systems and choke valves usually are manually operated, the drilling crew still has a challenge in maintaining the required downhole drilling constraints due to various operational procedures that is performed during drilling.

The research initiative, Automated Drilling, develops methodologies and procedures focusing on more automatic drilling procedures. Focus is to present and evaluate algorithms for automated co-ordinated control of drilling machinery, pump rates, chokes and drilling fluid properties.

Operational procedures including connections, tripping, back reaming and well control incidents will be addressed. In addition, also well completion issues such as liner running and cementing will be more automated.

Several control algorithms developed from from other industries such as aviation control and chemical process control will be evaluated. This includes both model-free algorithms such as linear control and various model-based approaches.

Automated Drilling utilize a control hierarchy for the range of equipment used during a drilling operations which enables the drilling crew to utilize the automatic procedures, both increasing safety for the crew and to reduce the drilling time.

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