High Performance Drilling Onshore Abu Dhabi

High performance drilling is an approach applied in the drilling of hole sections that are not primarily benefitting from data acquisition except the minimum like gamma ray and directional. Therefore these sections are drilled with high ROP and subsequently cased in support of reducing well costs. High performance drilling leading to continuous ROP optimization has been proven a key enabler for invisible lost time reduction (ILT), being one of the current regional well delivery challenges. In this paper we explain the approach followed by the team comprising of operator, service provider and equipment provider in reducing the impact of ILT during the actual drilling phase. We learnt that creating a performance culture based on rigorously applying of best practices and the eagerness to continuously improve on past performance as a first strategy and the application of novel directional drilling motor technology as the second resulted in ROP performance records. For example in one field an average ROP record was achieved of 188 ft / hour a 15 % improvement from the previous record. We learnt that in particular the communication between all parties i.e. the client office, the service provider and the team on the rig was the most important factor in order to create a shared vision on the need to improve the ROP based on the last ROP performance benchmark. Secondly the latest motor technology and the way of how it gets deployed, available to the team played a major role, and brought the performance level to a new dimension whereby the ROP was targeted to be optimum instead of maximum thereby reducing the risk for NPT related incidents (hole problems, equipment break-down) and repair and maintenance cost becoming cost prohibitive. This paper is specifically meant to share best practices from the last 10 years with the larger UAE drilling community. It is service provider contribution to provide insights for the new generation drilling engineers and directional drillers in safely pushing the drilling performance to higher levels all the time targeting the ILT in hole making. The work has proved that a combination of low torque high speed and high torque low speed can successfully performance drill all vertical hole sizes in the UAE on-shore fields either using tri-cone or PDC bits.Figure 1High performance motor