简介：在世界经济形式严峻的情况下，在2009钻井技术面临的挑战不断加大，其中包括降低钻井成本，使产油量最大化，提高机械钻速等。

The economy is shaky, but the fundamentals are the same ? operators will need to chase trickier targets and will need the best technology available to find them. 

The seismicVISION seismic-while-drilling service reduces depth uncertainty with real-time borehole seismic.

When a service company invests millions of dollars a year in new technology, it hopes to get a decent return on its investment. But when the economy tanks, that’s not always a sure thing.

Schlumberger’s new marketing and technology manager for its Drilling & Measurements Group, Ian Falconer, recently talked to E&P about where he sees the need for drilling technology in 2009. “There is going to be an ever-increasing push to decrease drilling costs and maximize production,” Falconer said. “Helping operators increase penetration rate and reservoir exposure in three key areas will be a big focus for us in 2009 and beyond.”

Exploration

“In exploration, the primary purpose of the well is for information, to confirm that the play is there, what the rocks and fluids are, and the size of the reservoir. As these exploration opportunities get more complicated, it becomes more difficult to capture this information, and there is increasing drilling risk,” he said. This leads to a greater need for accurate downhole measurements that can be calibrated with what has been seen on surface seismic.

“As our clients explore deeper, more complex geological structures, it’s less obvious, from traditional surface seismic techniques, what is going on down there.”
An update to Schlumberger’s seismic-while-drilling service now features real-time waveforms. Falconer said the company saw a significant uptake in this technology in 2008 to reduce seismic uncertainty in areas obscured by gas clouds or other difficult-to-image obstacles.

“These tools also allow operators to have a much higher level of comfort that they can put the casing at just the right depths,” he said. “More recently we have been able to use the service to place wells with respect to the flanks of salt diapirs, which we could never do in the past because the salt masks the typical seismic signature.”

Production

One area that Falconer expects will change in 2009 is an increased focus on getting more from existing reserves rather than rank exploration. About 35% of today’s production is coming from wells that are more than 35 years old, he said.

“There is a huge continual challenge as to how operators can squeeze the last drops out of those fields and keep them as viable assets,” he said. The company has recently introduced a new rotary steerable technology with these needs in mind. Smaller than standard tools, it is geared to enter smaller hole sizes so that it can drill through the tubing and find pockets of bypassed pay.

These tools also allow for a higher build rate. “You haven’t got to have a lot of room to play with, so in the rotary steerables domain our clients are looking for technology that can provide those high build rates.”

Unconventional reservoirs

“This is really the big unknown,” Falconer said. He sees the key challenge in unconventional reservoirs being the ability to significantly improve operational efficiency. “The problem is that you’re going to need a lot of wells to exploit those hydrocarbons effectively,” he said. “So you can’t afford for those wells to be conventional.”

This will require a new focus around “factory-type drilling,” the ability to repeatedly drill the same type of well many times very efficiently. To do this means better automation, the need for fewer personnel on site, and remote operations.

Already Schlumberger has had success with its Operation Support Centers (OSCs). It has about 50 of these centers worldwide where domain experts are co-located to support drilling operations remotely. Each individual can manage multiple rigs and can collaborate with people on the well site to offer his or her expertise.

The need for factory drilling “dovetails nicely” with the company’s OSC experience, but Falconer said Schlumberger will now take it to the next level. “We work very closely with our peers within the organization, particularly Integrated Project Management (IPM). IPM has the ability to custom-design the types of rigs we’ll need for these operations and then control the actual drilling machine while we control the bottomhole assembly,” he said. “If we can combine those two elements together and automate key parts of the workflow, then we can achieve that step-change in efficiency.”

While improved drilling automation would cut down on costs, Falconer warned that the other side of the coin is the need for much more precise well placement. “You may have to have a more accurate well placement technique than would be used traditionally,” he said. “That requires new technology in terms of new-generation surveying and ranging techniques, which reference one well to another so it can be known exactly where the well is placed in respect to the wells around it.

“There are a lot of interesting challenges in unconventional resources, but it’s technology from a totally different perspective.”