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Focus on digitalization technologies and P&A operations

30.09.2019

Annual DrillWell seminar 2019

The event took place at Sola Strand Hotel 24th and 25th of September 2019, and around 120 participants and partners of the DrillWell research centre participated in the seminar.
The seminar showed great interest in new cutting edge technologies within P&A (plugging and abandonment) issues and the increasingly need for further digitalization in drilling for oil and gas.

The seminar was opened by DrillWell Manager Sigmund Stokka in NORCE, who welcomed and presented the program for the next two days. “This is the last year of DrillWell as a so-called SFI - Centre for Research-Based Innovation, however there are plans to continue the seminar also for 2020 and beyond”, Stokka said.
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From left: The moderator, Research Manager Jan Einar Gravdal in NORCE and DrillWell Manager Sigmund Stokka.


drillwell annualreport2019 2Sola Strand Hotel got a perfect location close to the beach, airport and the city of Stavanger. 
Around 120 attendees registered for the 2019 DrillWell Seminar.


Our keynote speaker, Fredrik Varpe, Equinor, who has been the Chairman of DrillWell for the last three years, presented future drilling, well technology and latest R&D, seen from Equinor’s perspective.
“Equinor will drill about 3000 wells the coming years, and approximately 80 per cent of them is expected to be in depleted reservoirs”, said Varpe who also challenged the audience to contribute to new technology that may support the industry to reduce costs and environmental impact.
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Our keynote speaker, Manager Drilling & Well Technology, Fredrik Varpe, Equinor

The moderator, Research Manager Jan Einar Gravdal in NORCE (Norwegian Research Centre AS.), opened the first session of day one; “Digitalization Technologies for Automated Interpretation and Execution in Drilling Operations”. One of the main contributors in this field Mr. Eric Cayeux, NORCE, gave a presentation within “Downhole high frequency measurements enable detailed reconstruction of lateral drill pipe movement”. He demonstrated how such downhole measurements of drill pipe acceleration- and bending moment may be used to calculate the actual movement of the drill pipe. The software runs in real time and provides important information during the different stages of the drilling process. This is the first time such specialized high capability software has been developed.

WELL ID is a Norwegian based Well Logging Company which performs research & development and provides Services to the Oil & Gas and Geothermal industries.
DrillWell has worked together with WELL ID in developing its technologies alongside with industry leaders. Their CEO, Lars Øy, gave the presentation “Next generation drilling sensors - development and use”. He presented an overview of the 4D caliper tool which is now being extended with wired pipe compatibility. 
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Lars Øy is the CEO in WELL ID

In addition to accurate borehole shape and size measurements, Well ID also provides high frequency measurements from magnetometer, accelerometer and gyro.     

One of the most difficult issues to fully understand when drilling for oil and gas maybe “stick-slip”. It has been addressed by many in the past and continues to be a major issue. Together with the work on reconstruction of pipe movement in DrillWell, and measurements from WELL ID, and other vendors of downhole sensors - it is now possible to take a large step towards the understanding, detection and mitigation of stick-slip-situations. Eric Cayeux from NORCE demonstrated how this may be done and used cases from ConocoPhillips’ Eldfisk and Ekofisk-fields in his presentation titled; “Stick-slips and side-effects from downlinking procedures during drilling operations in the Eldfisk and Ekofisk fields”.
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Eric Cayeux from NORCE 



The seminar continued with a special session devoted to high-speed telemetry. One major challenge within drilling is that real-time communication with downhole sensors and tools are still very limited. This causes a lot of problems, and also restricts our ability to automate drilling. Efficient and good sensors exist, however – the industry does not utilize them to the full extent. This lack of communication with the downhole tools/sensors, is an obstacle to drilling automation. 

For this reason, DrillWell gathered three of the vendors using high-speed telemetry to present their products and status of developments. The first presentations in this section was by Tore Høgseth in ReelWell who presented the DualLink-technology and the status with regards to testing. The next presentation was given by Abdelrhani Lamik who introduced us to the Powerline Drill String from the company TDE and their latest developments and status. Reina Teelken from NOV gave us the third presentation and an overview of the status and further plans for the NOV Intelliserv wired pipe. Altogether, the three vendors gave a very valuable insight to the status of this important area of technology.
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Reina Teelken from NOV (National Oilwell Varco), one of three presenters from the vendor-industry that gave very valuable insight about the status of new digitalization technologies.

One of the longest running activities in DrillWell, is the issue with gas in oil-based mud.  It started with lab experiments and evolved into the well control simulator project. Well control is a topic where the lack of downhole measurements becomes a bottleneck and the result is often that we still need to rely on simulations to a large extent. Jan Ole Skogestad from SINTEF presented “New methodology for case studies of well control incidents”.
The seminar stayed in the domain of well control, and one of the former PhD students in DrillWell, and now a Product Development Engineer at Exebenus, Dalila Gomes gave an interesting  presentation named “Gas kick migration and unloading of riser”.

 

Drillbotics

Since 2015, DrillBotics has been organized by SPE’s Drilling Systems Automation Technical Section (DSATS). This is an international competition for universities to design and build a small drilling rig that uses sensors and control algorithms to autonomously drill a rock sample provided by SPE. The aim is to promote the adoption of automation techniques using surface and downhole machines and instrumentation to improve the safety and efficiency of the drilling process. In strong competition with many universities in the US and Canada, the teams representing DrillWell have always been among those ranking best in class. In 2018 NTNU won the competition and in 2019 UiS (University in Stavanger) was ranked 2nd. The first presentation was given by Professor Sigbjørn Sangesland, NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), who presented the results from NTNU.

“Unfortunately, problems with customs declaration to Germany prohibited them from demonstrating the rig in the final run in Celle, Germany. However, the system reached a very high score in an earlier evaluation in 2019”, Sigbjørn Sangesland said.
Håkon Hagen and Andreas Jakobsen representing the UiS shared the results from the finals with the DrillWell seminar members.

Manager Drilling & Well Technology, Fredrik Varpe from Equinor gave the last presentation of the first day.  Mr. Varpe gave an overview of Equinor’s strategy for drilling and well R&D.
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Fredrik Varpe from Equinor

“Equinor is setting up a new group to work with.  It is named “Enabling innovations” and has a perspective from 2022 and beyond. Information and challenges posted by Equinor can be found on our website”, explained Mr. Varpe.
 

Visits from Pertamina

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The delegation from Pertamina, an Indonesian state-owned oil and natural gas corporation based in Jakarta, Indonesia.  The team used the opportunity to meet new business contacts and get new and important insight to the research front and technology.



Day two:

P&A activities with special focus on cementing and leakages from plugged and abandoned wells.


Experts from Canada and the United States

Ian Frigaard is a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada and has also previously attended DrillWell seminars in Norway. He leads a team of 15 people who mainly work with well integrity, cementing and abandonment of wells.
“In total, we got more than 500,000 wells to be abandoned in Canada, and only in West Canada there are 175,000 gas wells. Several of these wells are leaking small amounts of gas. In a Canadian vs North Sea perspective, we see that Norway enforces much more strict rules and regulations with regards to leakages and P&A requirements,” says Professor Frigaard. He adds that the DrillWell seminar is an excellent arena for communicating new techniques and basic research on these issues.
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Ian Frigaard, PhD, University of British Columbia, Canada

From one professor to another. Andrew Wojtanowics is a professor (PhD PE) at Louisiana State University in USA. He shared his very interesting views on well-top testing and remediation of annular integrity loss due to gas migration.

“Yesterday I gave the same presentation to the students at Stavanger University (UiS). I really enjoyed meeting the students, got many questions and found it very interesting. Actually, more than 100 students showed up, but we also served free pizza, and that may explain the good turnout,” smiles Professor Andrew Wojtanowics.
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Andrew Wojtanowics, PhD PE, Louisiana State University, USA

 

Focus on cement integrity

For some time the industry has experienced that conventional cement barrier in wells may have limitations. Halliburton is currently testing out a new non-OPC (Ordinary Portland Cement) material.
“We do not have all the answers yet, because the new material hasn’t been fully tested. It is invented in Norway and we hope this could become a solid product that also reduces cost compared with ordinary cement. The new material can be mixed the same way as mud, and this simplifies the whole process”, says Gunnar Lende with Halliburton.
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From left: Gunnar Lende with Halliburton showing a sample of the new barrier material to the moderator Harald Linga from SINTEF 

A solid presentation was given by Amit Govil and Guillermo Obando Palacio, Schlumberger on validating ultrasonic log response against reference barrier cells simulating downhole well conditions encountered during well construction and abandonment operations.
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Guillermo Obando Palacio, Schlumberger

Later, Ragnhild Skorpa from SINTEF shared recent results from their work on cement sheath integrity. She explained and showed test results from experimental tests and numerical modelling and how cracks appear in annulus cement when the well is exposed to high pressures.
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From left: Ragnhild Skorpa from SINTEF and Anisa Noor Corina, NTNU

And PhD student Anisa Noor Corina, NTNU, presented her recent findings on simulations of flow through micro-annuli. Both the microannulus geometry and fluid type influence the flow behaviour.


Subsea well abandonment

Fraser McGaw, from CNR International (Canadian Natural Resources) gave an interesting presentation about challenges he and his team met when they started the subsea well abandonment for the Murchison field that was discovered in 1975. Decommissioning activities started from 2014 by plugging the wells.

“We started the abandonment project in 2014, and the well abandonment operations was completed in 2019. We had no safety or environmental incidents and the key to success was a fully engineered contingency operation”, said Fraser McGaw with CNR International.
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Fraser McGaw, CNR International.

 “Do not underestimates how hard it could be to take up x-mas-trees/valves etc. from the seabed. In total 27 wireline runs were planned, and 56 wireline runs were required. Working together with all stakeholder is absolutely essential”, concludes Fraser McGaw.


Tool for leakage probability

The last presentation aroused some interest and debate among the participants.  Øystein Arild, University of Stavanger/NORCE, showed how software modelling may provide information about possible future leakages from wells in the North Sea. He pointed out that input, well history and accurate data on each single well and facts about completion and plugging and abandonment are very important for the outcome.
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Øystein Arild, University of Stavanger/NORCE
 
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