Faster Drilling A Three-dimensional Horizontal Well By Integrating Well Path And BHA Design

Yuan Long; Xueying Wang; Qian Zhou; Feifei Zhang; Mingliang Li

doi:10.6180/jase.202311_26(11).0002

Faster Drilling A Three-dimensional Horizontal Well By Integrating Well Path And BHA Design

Yuan Long^1,2, Xueying Wang This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.^1,2, Qian Zhou^1,2, Feifei Zhang^1,2, and Mingliang Li³

¹School of Petroleum Engineering, Yangtze University, Wuhan 430100, China
²Hubei Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Drilling and Production Engineering, Yangtze University, Wuhan, China
³CNOOC China Limited Tianjin Branch, Tianjin 300450, China

Received: July 28, 2022
Accepted: November 5, 2022
Publication Date: March 7, 2023

Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.6180/jase.202311_26(11).0002

ABSTRACT

Well path design is an important factor in horizontal drilling. A reasonable well profile scheme can significantly reduce drilling drag and torque, which also can enhance drilling rate. This study proposes an approach to faster drill a three-dimensional horizontal well by integrating well path and bottomhole assembly (BHA) design. The shortcomings of two classic well path design principles of shortest well length and minimum drag are investigated and a method integrating well path and BHA design is developed by altering inclination holding section to a slightly build up section and predicting build rate of BHA. For two conventional design principles, the design processes are developed by minimum curvature model and genetic optimizing algorithm. Case studies show that the optimized well depth or drag of two conventional methods have little difference compared to the unoptimized ones, which indicates that these two optimization methods cannot significantly improve drilling efficiency. For proposed design method, the well path design is developed by minimum curvature model, and the drilling tendency prediction method is established by three-dimensional beam-column theory and the rock-bit interaction model. Besides, a set of bent-housing mud motor with double stabilizers (BH-PDM-D) BHA is chosen to drill the well, according to the build rate prediction of both slide drilling and rotary drilling. The predicted result of drilling cycle shows that for the six-section well profile, the proposed method can reduce the drilling time by 24.2 days.

Keywords: well path design; BHA design; torque and drag; horizontal well; rate of penetration

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