The Role of LWD-MWD and Real Time
Data Transmission in Reducing the
Drilling
Cost in Deep Water Operations
By
Chris Leigh1, Tarek Labib2
(1) Shell, Cairo, Egypt (2) Halliburton, Egypt, Cairo, Egypt
The costly
Drilling
and Formation Evaluation in deep water represent a
challenge to the oil industry. This challenge requires collaborative efforts to
combine the available technology and obtain the optimum rock and geo-science
information. The new Logging While
Drilling
LWD technology fulfill some of the
requirements to relax these challenges.
Regarding
Drilling
, The Pressure While
Drilling
tool solved the
problems
of
Monitoring the hole cleaning, increased the effectiveness of the carrying
capacities of the
drilling
fluid in the open hole as will as in the riser
section and provided means of detecting of the shallow hazards (gases or water
flow). The borehole stability, failure analysis, seismic-tie-in and pore
pressure can also be obtained using the acoustic LWD, the density LWD and the
Pressure while
drilling
.
Regarding Formation Evaluation, The combined Tripple combo LWD, NMR-LWD and The BAT (Bi-Modal Acoustic Tool) provides the means to obtain the porosity, water mobility, fluid types and fracture identification.
The ability to provide all the above using Real Time Operation, RTO, represents a vital technology to speed up the decision making and reduce the rig time to wait on changes.
In this paper, Examples from the Mediterranean Sea Deep Water operations are discussed and the future role of the LWD and Wireline formation evaluation with real time operation is explained.