Lessons Learned and the Way Forward In DW Drilling as a result of Shell/Bapetco’s 1st drilling campaign in NEMED

By

 Herman Calis¹, Moustafa Oraby²

(1) Bapetco company, Cairo, Egypt (2) Halliburton, Egypt, Cairo, Egypt

 The Shell Egypt Deepwater Services Well Delivery unit, seconded into JV company Bapetco established a DW drilling record for Egypt when 2 DW vertical exploration wells were drilled in 2001, in 1500 m and 1800 m Water.

The Phase-1 operations resulted in a wealth of lessons learned. With ample time to address the issues the Bapetco’s DW department did not only find the answers to long outstanding operational issues, it also went a step further and worked on new developments, technology and practices.

One of the most important steps in any operation is to learn from the previous operational experiences and to build up the proper learning curve. The learning curve is the methodology to be used in planning for the upcoming activities. This will lead to overcoming the problems faced in the previous operations and to apply the proper technology and solutions. From this understanding, the previous experiences that Bapetco had in the two Deep Water wells, Shorouk Ki-69-1 and Leil Kg-61-1 are discussed.

First a list of Highlights and Low lights are presented. With 80% of the NPT experienced in 2 area’s the learnings wrt Hole condition & MDT issues are explained. Latest a series of new developments, technology and practices are discussed.