Digital Energy Journal- OilTeams working with drilling data

Join | Existing Member Login

You are Home » News » View Article

OilTeams working with drilling data

Thursday, May 2, 2013

OilTeams of Milan, part of the BB Visual Group, provides services to help oil and gas companies do more with their drilling data

Data is treated very differently on the rig and in the office, Mr Saperdi said, speaking at the Digital Energy Journal conference in KL 'doing more with drilling data' on October 24th.

On the rig, people receive a flow of data collected from sensors. 'You have a monitoring system which is used to analyse the data and to provide the information needed to take operative decisions. This data is viewed and used only on the fly in real time.'

On the rig you have alarm systems based on threshold values, although alarms don't necessarily tell you much about what is happening down hole.

'To get early warning about possible problems in the hole, you may have to look at data over a certain duration, minutes, hours or even days,' he said.

When data is sent onto shore, people are typically managing data from many rigs all in one place.

'In a data center you look for information. You may have to watch what is going on various wells and you are more interested in borehole related events than in continuous changes of variables.

'You need to have the tools, to make easier to look this data. This means visualization and data integrations,' he said.

'You want to see the relationship between the real time data and other kind of data, static data, maybe data from other reference wells. This kind of integration is not always easy. It might need 'some manipulations or calculations in real time on the real time data.'

'Many of these variables change for reasons which are related to operations which are not a concern if you are away from the rig site. For example the fact that the pit level is changing may not be valuable information if you are not at rig site and probably not interested at all in knowing that a mud transfer is on-going.'

'If you are drilling shale gas at shallow depth and have a kick, it will be almost instantaneous, there could be very short time to react,' he said.

'But if the well is deeper, especially if permeability is low, you may not notice that you are getting into an underbalanced situation, and you may not notice subtle changes when those changes are very slow and not detectable by conventional alarms.'

'The same is for pore pressure changes which may be due to many factors, or if you have a crack in your drill pipe which develops over some time.'

'These slow changes are often undetected because at the rig site people are busy doing their work, they're looking at what happens at that moment.'

'If you are away from the rig site, sitting at the data center, you are concerned by multiple wells, and you are not concerned about the small changes in one of the thousand parameters that you are receiving at the data center.'

Modelling real time data

If problems are not easily detected either on the rig or on shore, then the solution might be to have better computer processing of the data on shore, or building models, to get better warnings.

People often try to build up models out of real time data, but they often don't have enough information, so they end up with a model containing partial information or wrong information, he said.

'In some cases it is possible to watch the problem like people do in the field, looking at the changes in behaviour of the drilling activity and looking for signatures in data that can help in detecting changes.

'We can look for symptoms, like a doctor does with a patient, before doing more complex examinations, he said.

'Then there is no substitution for competency, for people to take the appropriate action and work out if the warning is related to a down hole phenomenon or maybe there is some operational issue or something wrong with the data or a broken sensor.'

Data visualisation

It can be useful to show data in graphical formats, so it can be immediately understood.

'We can see where we are in terms of stratigraphy, in relationship with the reservoir, in terms of being close to the target or not.'

'This is something we can do for real time data only, or we can take in account of other categories of data at the same time.'

'As an example if we have a warning message system, we can visualize this warning in various ways. We can have warnings generated from the current real time operation and others derived from analysis of previous wells.'

'We can provide visualization which contains messages that can be used in the context of the current operation, to understand if there is something that we need to consider, and that is possible if you have the appropriate message at the right time.'

'Data must be gathered from well system, but also in the oil companies' office you have various type of database, various types of software.'

This allows cross-disciplinary teams to work together, because then they can have in real time all data needed.'

'If this integration is done then it not a problem to provide appropriate visualization,' he said. 'But if the integration is not done earlier then we have information which is partial and which does not allow to have a good level of collaboration between the various groups involved in planning and operating the wells.'

More in real time

'The line between real time and other types of data is fuzzy now,' he said.

'We may have a report of the time analysis which can be done in a standard way as a part of a report. You sum up the hours and produce a report at the end of the drilling phase or at the end of the well.'

'But you can also do this in real time concentrating the attention to smaller intervals.'

'For instance, if you can breakdown the total drilling time in rotating time and not rotating time, you may see that you take a lot of non-rotating time to do connections. That can help to understand what happened there if you had problems with differential pressure or see if there is any change to be done in the drilling plan to reduce risks to get stuck.'

Associated Companies
» Oil Teams

CREATE A FREE MEMBERSHIP

To attend our free events, receive our newsletter, and receive the free colour Digital Energy Journal.