Objective
To design and demonstrate percussion drilling system for 8 3/8", 8 1/2" and 12 1/4" hole size and in addition design and demonstrate percussion drilling system for slimhole and coiled tubing drilling. A successfully demonstrated system will enable fields regarded as marginal to be commercially developed in the case where development costs (i.e. drilling cost/time) formerly has been regarded to high due to slow penetration rates.
The THERMIE project has been a great success. Thanks to the funding received from the European Commission a small European company, G-Drill AB, has together with Smith International, Statoil and Petroleum Development Oman, been able to design and demonstrate a new drilling tool for the Oil & Gas industry.
G-Drill's mud driven percussion hammer is aimed primarily for drilling in hard formations. The percussion hammer outperforms state of the art conventional drilling techniques such as tri-cone by a factor 2 to 10 in rate of penetration (ROP), depending on depth and type of formation. The tool lifetime is comparable to that of conventional techniques.
As of now the mud hammer exists in two sizes, 7" and 4 3/4" OD (Outer Diameter). The 7" tool has so far successfully been used to drill 8 3/8" hole size at depths in excess of 4000 meters with mud as drilling fluid. Coiled tubing applications using a modified 3 3/4" water driven percussion hammer has also been successfully demonstrated.
Thus, this new existing drilling technology from G-Drill AB is ready to be launched on the market during 1999.
The innovative technology used in G-Drill's a ITH (In the Hole) percussion hammer, the Wassara, is the hydraulic propelling of the hammer as opposed to using air as propelling medium (pneumatic hammers). The technology has so far been used in the mining industry using water as drilling fluid. Within the scope of this project is to switch drilling fluid from water to mud for deep hole drilling applications for the oil and gas industry. Note that percussive drilling is by no means new to the petroleum industry. At the turn of the century cable chum drilling was big before getting outperformed by tri-cone bits, and at shallow depths pneumatic ITH hammers are used. The innovative part of this project in thus the combination of percussive drilling with hydraulic media and deep hole applications for the oil and gas industry.
The project is split up in four phases. In phase one a prototype percussion drilling system consisting of a 7" hammer, a scaled-up version of the 3 3/4" hammer usedin the mining applications, and a 8 3/8" percussion bit will be developed and tested in an actual well representing overall realistic environment for oil and gas applications. Phase two will modify the prototype developed in phase 1 and perform a field test with the system. Phase three consists of modifying the existing 3 3/4" hammer for slimhole and coiled tubing applications. The advantage of percussive drilling compared to conventional tri-cone bits is the potentially much higher rate of penetration in hard formations, possibly up to a factor of ten. Thus, the lower cost of drilling will open the opportunity to develop marginal fields in a cost efficient way where hard formation has previously been a limiting factor.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology environmental engineering mining and mineral processing
- engineering and technology environmental engineering energy and fuels fossil energy petroleum
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Coordinator
118 Stockholm
Sweden
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