Everyone picks on the drilling operation. It's too expensive. It takes too long. It's the most expensive part of the well system, and the boss wants me to cut costs.

Well folks, we're getting that higher level of performance. In some cases it's taking longer than we'd like.
In other cases industry isn't picking up the technology that could help reduce costs. But that's a management issue or a tradition-bound issue, and this article is not about politics or habits.

Operators and service companies have gone a long way, coming up with remote centers that tap into wellsite data sensors and transmitters to create a system that can pipe real-time well information to more people than television reality shows, if necessary.

The industry even has programs that tell the operator how to drill the well and yell "foul" if the actual well path deviates from the pre-set model.

The hardware manufacturers haven't been asleep, either. According to a US government report, a 15,000-ft (4,575-m) plus well that took 185 days to drill in 1985 took only 58 days in 2002.

Unocal used a Hughes Christensen Auger big design to drill at a rate of more than 2,000 ft (610 m) an hour in a 1,000 ft (305 m) section in the Gulf of Thailand, breaking five records for the area.
A Gulf of Thailand well that cost US $10.9 million and took 68 days to drill in 1980 now costs Unocal $950,000 and takes 5 days.

Every year, E&P adds new drilling records to its Drilling and Production Data Base. Some of the reasons for those records are processes and software, but when it gets down to cutting rock, it's the hardware that makes the difference.

New hardware is coming on line all the time. Helmerich & Payne's FlexRigs represented a step up in performance over conventional designs.

Drilling-with-casing speeds up the operation by allowing the operator to drill and case the well simultaneously, flow cement through the bit for isolation and then drill through the bit to conduct downhole operations. Fewer trips mean fewer dollars.

In Canada, Ensign Resource Service Group is building a 10-rig fleet of its Automated Drill Rig-1000-CT coiled tubing rigs that can use both coiled tubing up to 31/2 in. in diameter and conventional jointed drill pipe.

Targeted for shallow natural gas and coalbed methane wells, the company hopes to have the rigs in the field in 2005.

Mark Andreychuk, founder of Technicoil Corp., has had two rigs in the field for several years. These truck-mounted rigs use a patented combination of coil and jointed-pipe drilling. The pipe operation can use either a rotary table or a top drive.

The rigs, he said, can drill and complete 80% of the wells in North America.

Of course, those are all variations of conventional drilling mechanics, and the industry is working on doing things differently.

Currently, the best option to traditional systems is laser drilling, now in the research phase under the direction of Petroleum Engineering Professor Ramona Graves at Colorado School of Mines, with the help of an industry-government consortium.

It's less energy intensive than traditional drilling works on a smaller footprint and the drill can be conveyed on coiled tubing.

It offers faster penetration, requires no drill bits and cuts drilling time dramatically. In a Denver Post article, Graves said a 10,000-ft (3,050-m)Wind River Basin well that normally would cost $350,000 could be drilled as cheaply as $35,000 with a laser.

It can cut 10 to 100 times faster than a traditional bit. In tests a 1 MW blast cut 6 lb of sandstone in 4 seconds, she said.

A robot system can turn the laser beams, giving the system the capability of a steerable drilling system. Turned sideways, the beams can perforate a formation. Depending on the way the laser is used, it can melt, vaporize, crack or fuse rock, meaning it can case its own hole.

That's what the industry is looking for, a one-trip drilling, casing and perforating system.
Unfortunately, it's not ready yet. All of the work has been done in the laboratory.

Graves hopes to have a prototype ready in 2006, and if everything goes well, a working version could be ready as early as the end of this decade.

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