Drilling Innovations That Will Forever Change the Oil Industry

Oil drilling has now been practiced for over a century. The sector has developed by leaps and bounds as a result of several technological breakthroughs. This expansion has resulted in new advances in oil production that are altering the face of our civilization.

As early as 1880, the globe witnessed one of the earliest developments known as the rotary drill, which dramatically enhanced the oil drilling process. This rotary drill, however, was just the beginning of a lengthy line of subsequent developments that would eventually replace it in the twentieth century. In this post, we'll look at some of the most significant breakthroughs in oil production efficiency.

1. Offshore Drilling and ROVs

Oil drillers quickly discovered that wells located near seashores generated the most oil. This is why the industry needed to develop technologies for extracting oil from the seafloor. Drilling companies built oil rigs on several wharves in the 1980s, but the first oil well on land was discovered somewhere about 1947.

Remotely operated vehicles were among the early technologies that aided the establishment of these offshore drilling enterprises (ROVs). The US military was already using this technique to recover equipment that had been lost at sea. The oil sector was exploiting ROVs for their own purposes by the 1970s.

2. Hydraulic Fracturing

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is another new technology that Shale Gas relies on. This approach, which was created in 1940, has grown in popularity. Fracking is based on tight reservoirs, which often contain oil-bearing rocks with small holes, implying that the flow of oil from these is limited.

Drillers utilize fracturing to stimulate these wells by putting chemicals mixed with water into the well to produce pressure. This pressure, in turn, causes fractures in the rocks that can be hundreds of feet long. After these fissures are created, oil is allowed to flow freely out of the rock. According to numerous studies, fracking has contributed to an additional seven billion dollars oil barrels from wells in the United States.

3. Seismic Imaging

Initially, looking for oil wells was based solely on where oil had bubbled to the surface. Because most oil wells are buried far beneath the earth's surface, they cannot be discovered. Digging deep wells to set up rigs only to find barren patches was also highly costly.

Geologists were brought in to devise methods for locating oil wells that were hidden. They devised numerous approaches, the most important of which was 3-D seismic imaging. This system transmits sound waves into the ground and detects signals as the waves bounce off of obstacles.

This technology not only assisted in locating the most productive locations for establishing oil production units, but it also reduced the number of holes that were drilled without success.

4.   Measurement-While-Drilling Systems

One major disadvantage of seismic technologies was that they did not provide drilling operators with precise information about the amount of oil they were working with. These concerns were resolved in the 1980s thanks to a technology known as measurement-while-drilling (MWD).

With this system and its reliance on'mud pulse telemetry,' operators were able to collect and analyse real-time data, allowing them to establish the state of the oil well. This technology, in turn, enabled operators to drive oil wells in different ways based on the data they had gathered.

5.   Horizontal Drilling

We emphasized the potential of operators to steer their oil drilling operation in multiple directions while discussing MWD technologies. This capacity to drill in directions other than straight has become one of the most significant technological achievements in the history of the oil drilling process.

Oil reservoirs tend to be spread out horizontally from time to time, making vertical wells an ineffective method of extraction. This is why these technologies enable operators to dig vertically initially and then pivot to a horizontal well at the 'kick-off point.'

This technology has not only enabled the extraction of oil from horizontal wells, but it has also assisted operators in conducting their operations in a more environmentally friendly manner. The first horizontal wells were dug in 1929, but the process was prohibitively expensive at the time. However, with the introduction of hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling became a more inexpensive and realistic choice. By the late 1980s, nearly all oil drilling companies across the world were adopting horizontal drilling.

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Key of Technologies are Advancing Oil and Gas Drilling

Oil and gas (O&G) is still a thriving industry, managing $1.7 trillion USD per year and requiring over 94 million barrels of petroleum per day globally. It is expected that demand for fossil fuels would rise by around 25% during the next 22 years. As a result, in an era when automation, digital process control, and IoT are regarded as "common innovation processes," oil and gas companies have begun to adopt technologies that can assist them in gaining access to small isolated offshore reservoirs as well as areas characterized by extreme environments.

The 2016 Upstream Oil and Gas Digital Trends Survey identified eight critical areas in which the O&G industry should adjust in order to reap the benefits across their extractive environments. The fastest developing fields among them were robotics and drones, artificial intelligence, and wearable technology.

At the moment, more than 80% of Oil and Gas enterprises are undergoing a digital transformation that has the potential to unleash $1.6 trillion USD by enhancing reliability, optimizing operations, and creating new value. Furthermore, the adoption of "common innovation processes" can assist the O&G industry in gaining environmental credibility because robotics and drones, artificial intelligence, and wearable technologies offer tangible options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, saving water, and avoiding oil spills, for example. Finally, modern operational technology translates into more efficient and less risky operations, and has the potential to deliver a wealth of process data to optimize O&G extraction procedures.

A number of developing technologies can help the O&G business comply with health, safety, and environmental regulations while also being cost-effective.

Robotic drilling systems (RDSs) provide entirely unmanned drill floors for both land and offshore operations. RDSs can handle pipes and tools, as well as replace casing crews and tongs, and they can handle machinery that revolve. Furthermore, cutting-edge drilling technology provides self-moving autonomous drill rigs that may be transported around an oil field from one well position to the next.

In-pipe inspection robots (IPIRs) can identify fractures, corrosion, and severe problems in pipes, which can cause pipe failures and halt output. These robots have nondestructive testing sensors that are embedded in the pipeline network. IPIRs operate autonomously at this point. They can send data and control signals; for example, IPIRs feature wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that can detect sand buildup, pipe damage, vandalism or theft, and fluid leaks in addition to monitoring pipeline integrity. WSNs are intended to communicate across the relay node, transmitting data to a single base station.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are another option for inspecting O&G facilities. Drones are increasingly being used to monitor tanks, pipelines, and refineries on a regular basis. Drones are frequently operated from a ground control station, necessitating the use of advanced flight control algorithms, inertial navigation, data fusion, and tracking control. These characteristics make drones useful for exploring O&G reservoirs in severe situations where human investigation is not feasible. To undertake faster and safer inspections, drones can be outfitted with a thermal camera, lights, and optical camera operators.

Aside from smart sensors and machine interface, recent advancements in 4D seismic data gathering and computer capacity are assisting O&G businesses in capturing more accurate subsurface geology for finding fossil fuel resources.

Oil and gas corporations who are already looking ahead:

Maersk Oil has established a new unmanned platform, the Tyra Southeast-B, in the Danish North Sea, following the operation of the first unmanned, fully automatic, and remote operating platform, the Norwegian Oseberg H, located on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. Tyra's reserves are predicted to grow by 50 million barrels of oil equivalent (MMBOE) during the next three decades.

Statoil, Enegi Oil (Nu-oil), the Wood Group, and the China Offshore Oil Engineering Company are concentrating their efforts on operations to access more minor reservoirs. Small reservoirs have recoverable reserves of less than 20 MMBOE. According to Enegi Oil, there are 88 fields in the North Sea with fewer than 15 MMBOE that can be developed using buoy technology, for example. Others are taking notice of the region north of the Arctic Circle, which "may contain roughly 30% of the world's undiscovered gas and 13% of the world's unknown oil deposits."

In Canada, Statoil and Husky Energy are exploring drilling for oil and gas resources in deep-water, far-offshore oil 500 kilometers off Canada's east coast, in the Flemish Pass Basin, using ocean and subsea technology, remote sensing, and autonomous underwater vehicles.

To summarize, automation and digitalization may provide certain benefits to the oil and gas industry in terms of safety, environmental performance, public health, productivity, operations, efficiency, reliability, and investment. To remain competitive, oil and gas companies must evolve, as the means in which energy is generated, consumed, and distributed have changed tremendously. We are living in an era in which people have more decision-making power based on real-time data.

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The challenge to Drill the depth of the New Offshore Wells

About 80 kilometers from the coast, 1,500 meters below the water surface. The "numbers" of Macondo make an impression: just ten years ago the idea of ​​extracting oil on the high seas, at such high depths, was simply science fiction. And yet, faced with the greatest ecological disaster in the history of the oil industry, there is a comment that recurs with particular frequency among the experts: "BP was not dealing with a difficult well".

Over the course of a few years, the progress of offshore technologies has been so great that it has allowed companies to achieve the limits of the impossible, in front of which Macondo seems almost an amateur exercise. The Deepwater Horizon itself, the platform exploded on April 20, had just broken the submarine drilling record, identifying - again on behalf of BP and always in the Gulf of Mexico - the Tiber field, 10.6 km above sea level, of which over 9 under the backdrop.

There were 33 other offshore installations engaged in exploring the seabed at depths equal to or greater than those of Macondo in the United States. After the Macondo incident, the White House ordered that everyone stay for six months, waiting. of a crackdown on security conditions. The overall number of drills in the Gulf of Mexico, however, is much higher: according to the statistics of Rigzone, in April there were 243, of which about half were in use (in the world they were 578). As for the number of wells, the bottoms in front of Texas and Louisiana are literally studded with holes: it is estimated that there are about 3,500, dug with increasing frenzy as the search for crude oil on the mainland became more difficult, due to the decline of the most "at hand" fields and the spread of so-called resource nationalism. Technology has made it possible to make a virtue of necessity, with progress that in recent years has undergone a truly dizzying acceleration.

Oil was searched for the first time in water in 1938, at a depth of just 4 meters, with a few swimming strokes from Louisiana. The first really "offshore" well, 17 km off the same state, dates back to 1947: the platform was no bigger than a tennis court (the Deepwater Horizon had the size of a couple of football fields) and the crude was transported to land with barges taken by the Navy at the end of the Second World War.

It had to wait until the 1980s before Royal Dutch Shell managed to break the 1,000 foot deep (304.8 meter) threshold and up to 2000 to get to Macondo's 1.5 kilometer, with the Hoover Diana made by Saipem for ExxonMobil. Perdido - inaugurated last March 31 by Shell and capable of producing up to 100 thousand barrels of crude oil and 50 thousand cubic meters of gas per day - sinks its drills into the water for 3 km, more or less like five stacked Empire State Buildings.

But the real breakthrough in the offense is not only linked to the creation of increasingly powerful and sophisticated platforms, but to the new technologies for detecting the deposits, which allow to probe the depths, reconstructing images with three or even four dimensions of the potential deposits of hydrocarbons. This is how great discoveries have been made like that of Tupi, off the coast of Brazil, or Jubilee in the waters of Ghana. Discoveries that represent the future of oil. 

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Fire and Explosion Risk in Oil Gas Drilling

There is always a risk of blowout when perforating a well, with a gas or vapour cloud release, followed by explosion and fire. Additional potential for fire and explosion exists in gas process operations.

Offshore platform and drilling rig workers should be carefully evaluated after having a thorough physical examination. The selection of offshore crew members with a history or evidence of pulmonary, cardiovascular or neurological diseases, epilepsy, diabetes, psychological disturbances and drug or alcohol addiction requires careful consideration. Because workers will be expected to use respiratory protection equipment and, in particular, those trained and equipped to fight fires, they must be physically and mentally evaluated for capability of carrying out these tasks. The medical examination should include psychological evaluation reflective of the particular job requirements.

Emergency medical services on offshore drilling rigs and production platforms should include provisions for a small dispensary or clinic, staffed by a qualified medical practitioner on board at all times. The type of medical service provided will be determined by the availability, distance and quality of the available onshore services. Evacuation may be by ship or helicopter, or a physician may travel to the platform or provide medical advice by radio to the onboard practitioner, when needed. A medical ship may be stationed where a number of large platforms operate in a small area, such as the North Sea, to be more readily available and quickly provide service to a sick or injured worker.

Persons not actually working on drilling rigs or platforms should also be given pre-employment and periodic medical examinations, particularly if they are employed to work in abnormal climates or under harsh conditions. These examinations should take into consideration the particular physical and psychological demands of the job.

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Working Conditions, Health and Safety in Oil Gas Frilling

Work on drilling rigs usually involves a minimum crew of 6 people (primary and secondary drillers, three assistant drillers or helpers (roughnecks) and a cat-head person) reporting to a site supervisor or foreman (tool pusher) who is responsible for the drilling progression. The primary and secondary drillers have overall responsibility for drilling operations and supervision of the drilling crew during their respective shifts. Drillers should be familiar with the capabilities and limitations of their crews, as work can progress only as fast as the slowest crew member.

Assistant drillers are stationed on the platform to operate equipment, read instruments and perform routine maintenance and repair work. The cathead person is required to climb up near the top of the derrick when drill pipe is being fed into or drawn out of the well hole and assist in moving the sections of pipe into and out of the stack. During drilling, the cathead person also operates the mud pump and provides general assistance to the drilling crew.

Persons who assemble, place, discharge and retrieve perforating guns should be trained, familiar with the hazards of explosives and qualified to handle explosives, primer cord and blasting caps. Other personnel working in and around oil fields include geologists, engineers, mechanics, drivers, maintenance personnel, electricians, pipeline operators and laborers.

Wells are drilled around the clock, on either 8- or 12-hour shifts, and workers require considerable experience, skill and stamina to meet the rigorous physical and mental demands of the job. Overextending a crew may result in a serious accident or injury. Drilling requires close teamwork and coordination in order to accomplish the tasks in a safe and timely fashion. Because of these and other requirements, consideration must be given to the morale and health and safety of workers. Adequate periods of rest and relaxation, nutritious food and appropriate hygiene and living quarters, including air conditioning in hot, humid climates and heating in cold-weather areas, are essential.

The primary occupational hazards associated with exploration and production operations include illnesses from exposure to geographical and climatic elements, stress from travelling long distances over water or harsh terrain and personal injury. Psychological problems may result from the physical isolation of exploratory sites and their remoteness from base camps and the extended work periods required on offshore drilling platforms and at remote onshore sites. Many other hazards particular to offshore operations, such as underwater diving, are covered elsewhere in this Encyclopedia.

Offshore work is dangerous at all times, both when on and off the job. Some workers cannot handle the stress of working offshore at a demanding pace, for extended periods of time, under relative confinement and subject to ever changing environmental conditions. The signs of stress in workers include unusual irritability, other signs of mental distress, excessive drinking or smoking and use of drugs. Problems of insomnia, which may be aggravated by high levels of vibration and noise, have been reported by workers on platforms. Fraternization among workers and frequent shore leave may reduce stress. Seasickness and drowning, as well as exposure to severe weather conditions, are other hazards in offshore work.

Illnesses such as respiratory tract diseases result from exposure to harsh climates, infections or parasitic diseases in areas where these are endemic. Although many of these diseases are still in need of epidemiological study in drilling workers, it is known that oil workers have experienced periarthritis of the shoulder and shoulder blade, humeral epicondylitis, arthrosis of the cervical spine and polyneuritis of the upper limbs. The potential for illnesses as a result of exposure to noise and vibration is also present in drilling operations. The severity and frequency of these drilling-related illnesses appears to be proportional to the length of service and exposure to adverse working conditions (Duck 1983; Ghosh 1983; Montillier 1983).

Injuries while working in drilling and production activities may result from many causes, including slips and falls, pipe handling, lifting pipe and equipment, misuse of tools and mishandling explosives. Burns may be caused by steam, fire, acid or mud containing chemicals such as sodium hydroxide. Dermatitis and skin injuries may result from exposure to crude oil and chemicals.

The possibility exists for acute and chronic exposure to a wide variety of unhealthful materials and chemicals which are present in oil and gas drilling and production. Some chemicals and materials which may be present in potentially hazardous amounts are listed in and include:

• Crude oil, natural gas and hydrogen sulfide gas during drilling and blowouts
• Heavy metals, benzene and other contaminants present in crude
• Asbestos, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid and other hazardous chemicals and materials

·     Normally occurring radioactive materials (NORMs) and equipment with radioactive sources.

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Natural Gas Production and Processing Operations

There are two types of wells producing natural gas. Wet gas wells produce gas which contains dissolved liquids, and dry gas wells produce gas which cannot be easily liquefied

After natural gas is withdrawn from producing wells, it is sent to gas plants for processing. Gas processing requires a knowledge of how temperature and pressure interact and affect the properties of both fluids and gases. Almost all gas-processing plants handle gases that are mixtures of various hydrocarbon molecules. The purpose of gas processing is to separate these gases into components of similar composition by various processes such as absorption, fractionation and cycling, so they can be transported and used by consumers.

Absorption processes

Absorption involves three processing steps: recovery, removal and separation.

• Recovery.

Removes undesirable residue gases and some methane by absorption from the natural gas. Absorption takes place in a counterflow vessel, where the well gas enters the bottom of the vessel and flows upward through absorption oil, which is flowing downward. The absorption oil is “lean” as it enters the top of the vessel, and “rich” as it leaves the bottom as it has absorbed the desirable hydrocarbons from the gas. The gas leaving the top of the unit is called “residue gas.”

Absorption may also be accomplished by refrigeration. The residue gas is used to pre-cool the inlet gas, which then passes through a gas chiller unit at temperatures from 0 to –40 °C. Lean absorber oil is pumped through an oil chiller, before contacting the cool gas in the absorber unit. Most plants use propane as the refrigerant in the cooler units. Glycol is injected directly into the inlet gas stream to mix with any water in the gas in order to prevent freezing and formation of hydrates. The glycol-water mixture is separated from the hydrocarbon vapour and liquid in the glycol separator, and then reconcentrated by evaporating the water in a regenerator unit.

• Removal

The next step in the absorption process is removal, or demethanization. The remaining methane is removed from the rich oil in ethane recovery plants. This is usually a two-phase process, which first rejects at least one-half of the methane from the rich oil by reducing pressure and increasing temperature. The remaining rich oil usually contains enough ethane and propane to make reabsorption desirable. If not sold, the overhead gas is used as plant fuel or as a pre-saturator, or is recycled to the inlet gas in the main absorber.

• Separation.

The final step in the absorption process, distillation, uses vapours as a medium to strip the desirable hydrocarbons from the rich absorption oil. Wet stills use steam vapours as the stripping medium. In dry stills, hydrocarbon vapours, obtained from partial vaporization of the hot oil pumped through the still reboiler, are used as the stripping medium. The still controls the final boiling point and molecular weight of the lean oil, and the boiling point of the final hydrocarbon product mix.

Other Processes

• Fractionation.

Is the separation of the desirable hydrocarbon mixture from absorption plants, into specific, individual, relatively pure products. Fractionation is possible when the two liquids, called top product and bottom product, have different boiling points. The fractionation process has three parts: a tower to separate products, a reboiler to heat the input and a condenser to remove heat. The tower has an abundance of trays so that a lot of vapour and liquid contact occurs. The reboiler temperature determines the composition of the bottom product.

• Sulphur recovery.

Hydrogen sulphide must be removed from gas before it is shipped for sale. This is accomplished in sulphur recovery plants.

• Gas cycling.

Gas cycling is neither a means of pressure maintenance nor a secondary method of recovery, but is an enhanced recovery method used to increase production of natural gas liquids from “wet gas” reservoirs. After liquids are removed from the “wet gas” in cycling plants, the remaining “dry gas” is returned to the reservoir through injection wells. As the “dry gas” recirculates through the reservoir it absorbs more liquids. The production, processing and re circulation cycles are repeated until all of the recoverable liquids have been removed from the reservoir and only “dry gas” remains.

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Survey for Searching Oil and Gas

Sesmic Survey

The search for oil and gas requires a knowledge of geography, geology and geophysics. Crude oil is usually found in certain types of geological structures, such as anticlines, fault traps and salt domes, which lie under various terrains and in a wide range of climates. After selecting an area of interest, many different types of geophysical surveys are conducted and measurements performed in order to obtain a precise evaluation of the subsurface formations, including:

• Magnetometric surveys. Magnetometers hung from airplanes measure variations in the earth’s magnetic field in order to locate sedimentary rock formations which generally have low magnetic properties when compared to other rocks.

• Aerial photogrammetric surveys. Photographs taken with special cameras in airplanes, provide three-dimensional views of the earth which are used to determine land formations with potential oil and gas deposits.

• Gravimetric surveys. Because large masses of dense rock increase the pull of gravity, gravimeters are used to provide information regarding underlying formations by measuring minute differences in gravity.

• Seismic surveys. Seismic studies provide information on the general characteristics of the subsurface structure. Measurements are obtained from shock waves generated by setting off explosive charges in small-diameter holes, from the use of vibrating or percussion devices on both land and in water, and from underwater blasts of compressed air. The elapsed time between the beginning of the shock wave and the return of the echo is used to determine the depth of the reflecting substrata. The recent use of super-computers to generate three-dimensional images greatly improves evaluation of seismic test results.
• Radiographic surveys. Radiography is the use of radio waves to provide information similar to that obtained from seismic surveys.

• Stratigraphic surveys. Stratigraphic sampling is the analysis of cores of subsurface rock strata for traces of gas and oil. A cylindrical length of rock, called a core, is cut by a hollow bit and pushed up into a tube (core barrel) attached to the bit. The core barrel is brought to the surface and the core is removed for analysis.

When the surveys and measurements indicate the presence of formations or strata which may contain petroleum, exploratory wells are drilled to determine whether or not oil or gas is actually present and, if so, whether it is available and obtainable in commercially viable quantities.

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