Drilling advances

If the typical process for testing a BOP, particularly on a land rig, was a microcosm of the current state of drilling technology, gnarled fingers would routinely negotiate spinning chains to make connections, and we would still use bailers to extract cuttings. Manually intensive and relying on technology introduced more than 30 years ago, the moldy procedure for the mandatory BOP tests would be more at home in a museum than at a contemporary drilling location.

Thanks to work undertaken by Shell six years ago, verifying the integrity of a BOP has finally caught up with today’s high-tech drilling environment. Shell’s BOP testing automation initiative has since demonstrated significant improvement in process and personnel safety, accuracy, and a more-than-50% reduction in testing times, says Mark Anderson, managing member of consultancy Anderson & Spilman LLC of Houston, which he formed last October after a 37-year career with Shell. The BOPX project, which holds eight patents with 10 patents pending, covers a wide scope, from pressure test planning, data collation, interpretation of pressure testing data, data exchange, modeling and data analysis, pumping equipment, valve position identification, value actuation, leak detection to reporting.

“We digitized the testing process by adding automation to it, then we added analytics,” he told the June IADC Drilling Engineers Committee Technology Forum in Houston.

Separately, in a related development, the US. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory has been awarded a patent for “groundbreaking” rapid kick detection technology that provides real-time updates of pressure changes around the bit. Also named in the patent are the DOE’s Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education and University of Southern California professor Fred Aminzadeh.

“Always done this way.” Meanwhile, the BOPX grew out of a directional drilling automation project that Shell initiated in 2013, in which drilling engineers were linked with downstream automation engineers. “It came time for a BOP test, and the drillers in the group were quite happy, as they had a fixed code and could take a break. The automation engineers were very excited, because testing process safety equipment in a refinery apparently is a really big deal, so they wanted to see how we do it on a drilling rig,” said Anderson, who serves as chairman of the SPE Drilling Systems Automation Technical Section.

What they saw was a high-pressure pump on the back of a truck, an analog circular pressure chart recorder patented in 1988, a crew standing about waiting to line up valves, and the final report to state regulators. Anderson said the downstream folks were less than impressed, asking, “is this really how you treat your process safety equipment?” After the drilling team sheepishly responded, “it’s always been done that way,” Shell quickly recognized a number of step-change improvements were in order.

The first step in the development was replacing the antiquated chart recorder with a digital pressure recorder, which is the heart of the BOPX system. The tamper-proof recorder is essentially a PC that enables a host of functions, including automated pass-fail and real-time monitoring with the capacity to view the test as it is underway. Consequently, Anderson said the user is able to fingertip-control the pumps and valve position, actuate valves and by using ultrasonics, readily identify any leaking valves, saving troubleshooting time. “We’re also able to move people away from pressurized equipment,” he said.

Palpable results. In an earlier deployment in the Bakken shale, the BOPX saved 10 min./pressure cycle test against stringent federal specifications; and it cut 75 min./test on a Shell tension-leg platform. “We took it down to Argentina, where the average test time was 12 hr, not including preparing the equipment, with a best-in-class time of 10 hr. In our first deployment, we came in at 9.2 hr and identified another three hours of savings. Now, we have a technical limit test time of 6.2 hr,” he said.

Going forward, Anderson said uploading the system to the cloud with an iPad connection would allow applicable personnel to monitor a test from any location. “A wireless pressure sensor can take additional costs out of the equipment and make it much easier to use,” he said. “We also have everything in place to do a fully autonomous BOP test, though we haven’t tested it in the field.”

However, as reflected in the trial of a linear pressure pump, capable of determining pass-fail in 30 sec by using a constant pressure variable test, deploying new BOP testing technology can be a frustrating slog. “BOP testing is highly regulated and proceduralized, so it’s not a place where it’s easy to interrupt testing with a new technology,” he said.

Early heads-up. Circling back to the kick detection technology, NETL says the objective is to provide operators an early warning system before a kick migrates to the rig floor. The newly patented system leverages LWD, MWD and SWD data to quickly identify changes in the intra-borehole environment related to the invasion of water, gas, or oil into the wellbore, at or near the drill bit, NETL says.

Kelly Rose, PhD, the geology and geophysical team lead at NETL’s Research and Innovation Center in Albany, Oregon, said advanced algorithms were developed to process and relay downhole information in real time. Thus, operators no longer have to depend on untimely surface-based observations and associated equipment to provide kick alerts.

NETL says Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Total and other operators have expressed interest in pursuing further development. The patent is still available for licensing through NETL Partnerships. WO

About the Authors

Jim Redden

Contributing Editor

Jim Redden is a Houston-based consultant and a journalism graduate of Marshall University, has more than 40 years of experience as a writer, editor and corporate communicator, primarily on the upstream oil and gas industry.