PCB4213 Advanced Drilling Engineering Sept Semester 2016

Assignment 1: Directional Drilling (10 Marks)

Due on Monday 7 November 2016

This assignment is done individually by each student.

There is a need to drill a production well to a vertical depth of 6000 ft using directional drilling
technology.

1. Students are free to decide the horizontal coordinators of the target point. The
assignment report should describe a (assumed) reason for choosing the horizontal
coordinators. (Consider the purposes for directional drilling to find a reason).

2. Design the well trajectory by deciding trajectory types, maximum inclination angels,
build up rates and other parameters.

3. Describe what drilling tools can be used for drilling such a well trajectory

4. Assume the drilling operation has errors such that, besides planned inclination and
azimuth angles change as drilling forward, every measurement depth
increase = 180 ft will add an inclination angle and azimuth angle change error
1 respectively. The errors will accumulate as the drilling progress. The + or sign
can be randomly decided, for example by tossing a coin, or using a random function
in Excel, MATLAB or other software to generate a random number and then take its
sign.

5. When the survey shows that the drilling reaches a point that is greater than 10 ft away
from the designed trajectory, action should be taken to correct the drilling direction.
Assume that directional drilling correction tool has DLS or build up rate 3/100 ft and
can drill for 180 ft, decide a suitable tool face angle in relation to the high side of
the hole and calculate the final inclination and azimuth angle when the correction
drilling finish. Then continue drilling according your design.

6. Do such a drilling, survey and correction drilling procedure till reaching the target point
with less than 10 ft error.

7. In the assignment report, describe reasons on every decision you have made and the
calculations. Present the calculation results in spread sheet and plot designed
trajectory and drilled trajectory using any suitable software available to you.

Bear in mind that this is an imaginary problem for students to review and practice the learned
knowledge and skill. Students can make reasonable assumptions and adjusting the parameter
values if necessary.

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