The Role of LWD-MWD and Real Time Data Transmission in Reducing the Drilling Cost in Deep Water Operations

By

 Chris Leigh¹, Tarek Labib²

(1) Shell, Cairo, Egypt (2) Halliburton, Egypt, Cairo, Egypt

 The costly Drilling and Formation Evaluation in deep water represent a challenge to the oil industry. This challenge requires collaborative efforts to combine the available technology and obtain the optimum rock and geo-science information. The new Logging While Drilling LWD technology fulfill some of the requirements to relax these challenges.

Regarding Drilling, The Pressure While Drilling tool solved the problems of Monitoring the hole cleaning, increased the effectiveness of the carrying capacities of the drilling fluid in the open hole as will as in the riser section and provided means of detecting of the shallow hazards (gases or water flow). The borehole stability, failure analysis, seismic-tie-in and pore pressure can also be obtained using the acoustic LWD, the density LWD and the Pressure while drilling.

Regarding Formation Evaluation, The combined Tripple combo LWD, NMR-LWD and The BAT (Bi-Modal Acoustic Tool) provides the means to obtain the porosity, water mobility, fluid types and fracture identification.

The ability to provide all the above using Real Time Operation, RTO, represents a vital technology to speed up the decision making and reduce the rig time to wait on changes.

In this paper, Examples from the Mediterranean Sea Deep Water operations are discussed and the future role of the LWD and Wireline formation evaluation with real time operation is explained.