Drilling advances

	Vol. 227 No. 1
LES SKINNER, PE CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

How to save loads of money on well control. In keeping with our pledge to educate the younger members of the Ancient Order of Oilfield Trash, this is yet another missive on the means and methods to save tons of money on well control. So, read carefully, and you too can become adept at avoiding all those useless costs for well control.

Don’t design the wellhead and BOP stack for maximum anticipated surface pressure. Reservoir pressure minus a column of gas? Get serious. There will always be a column of mud in the hole. Its hydrostatic pressure will keep surface pressures down. If a 10,000 psi wellhead and stack is indicated for a well, just order out 5,000 psi stuff. It should handle any pressure that comes along, and it costs a whole lot less. Besides, there’s a safety factor built in, right? It’s the same with the casing. Burst won’t be an issue as long as there is mud in the hole. Any old used casing should do the job.

Testing the BOP stack should only be done with the rig pumps. Since a kick is never really an issue, whatever pressure the pumps will put out without breaking a nail (shear pin) should be sufficient to test the stack. This will save the cost of hiring a test pump and getting a chart. If there’s no kick, the chart is just another piece of paper to file away anyhow. So, the BOP rams are rated to 10,000 or 15,000 psi! Big deal. If it doesn’t leak at 3,000 psi, it won’t leak at 10,000 psi.

Checking the accumulator bottles for the correct precharge pressure is useless. The closing unit will work just fine off the hydraulic pumps. Those bottles will eventually pressure up, so the actual precharge pressure in the bottles doesn’t matter at all. It may take some time with only the one pump on the skid working, but it should be OK, since the well probably won’t kick anyhow. If you don’t check the bottles, you won’t have to order any nitrogen to pre-charge them. Makes perfect sense . . . .

Don’t waste the time hooking up the remote BOP control panel on the floor. This piece of equipment requires a whole bunch of effort to connect all those little hoses. It’s never used, and last time we hooked it up it wouldn’t work anyway. So, just leave it below deck in the compressor room. Nobody will ever miss it. If the crewmembers are so lazy that they can’t get downstairs quickly to close the BOP, we should just run them off and get new ones.

Don’t bother running pit drills with the crews. They all know what to do if a kick occurs. Why spend the time to shut down operations long enough to do a pit drill. The objective is to drill hole, not to run a bunch of drills. If a kick comes along and one of the crewmembers doesn’t know what to do, you can just train him at the time. It will mean a lot more to him with oil base mud blowing to the crown. He’ll sure remember it longer (if he stays around).

Marking the four-way handles on the closing unit is not necessary. We run the control lines the same way on every well. Everybody on the rig knows which handle operates each BOP. If someone needs to close a ram, they can close either one of the two handles that control the pipe rams (now that the superintendent made us start installing two sets of pipe rams). Just send one of the hands downstairs and tell him to close a ram. He’ll figure it out! (Sure hope he remembers not to close the blind rams or the shears.)

Well control training for the driller and toolpusher is a waste of time and money. These guys have been on the rig for a long time. They should know everything about circulating out a kick by now. This idea of going through an IADC or IWCF school every two years is senseless. The cost won’t be reimbursed by the insurance company or the operator, so why spend it just to get the certificate? Now, even the government doesn’t require a certificate, so why spend the money on training, when the senior crewmembers already know all there is to know about well control by experience?

Keeping a pit of kill-weight mud ready to pump is a waste of money. Keeping a kill pill ready to pump costs money to mix, roll and maintain. Plus, it takes up room in the pit system, not to mention having to clean yet another pit at the end of the job. If a kick occurs, we can always use the Wait and Weight method. There should be plenty of time. Sure, the Driller’s Method is quicker, but keeping that mud around is annoying and expensive.

Forget about having an updated Blowout Contingency Plan. This plan, like all other plans, cost money to write and then it has to be updated periodically to make it viable. By having the plan around, we’ll have to do pit drills and those silly evacuation drills. Blowout contingency planning really isn’t possible, since nobody knows what will happen anyway. Why plan for something that involves complete unknowns? If something bad happens, we can deal with it then. So, don’t worry about it. Just keep turning and burning!

Don’t get a well control company involved in drilling operations to avoid problems. Well control specialists and engineers are real expensive to have on a rig. Sure, they may help avoid a kick and they sure are good to have around in case something bad happens (you can always blame them if things turn sour); however, the cost for these folks is just too high to justify. It’s much less expensive just to call one up when, and if, a well control incident is in progress. They’ll come a-running, if they’re available. This old saying about “an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure” must have been written by someone who didn’t have to pay the bills.

Never buy well control insurance unless there just is no other option. Talk about expensive! Well control insurance premiums are so expensive that even the government can’t afford them. So, don’t get a policy, if you can avoid it. If they make you get one, don’t insure for the replacement cost of the rig or the well. Just get minimum coverage. If there is too big a target out there, someone will sue you just to get some money. There’s no sense getting insurance to cover an event that probably will never occur anyway.

So, there you have it. Follow this advice and you’ll save lots of money on well control, at least until a blowout occurs. Then, the insurance company will be paying all the bills and it won’t really matter, right? You did buy insurance, didn’t you? 

Les Skinner, a Houston-based consultant and a chemical engineering graduate from Texas Tech University, has 32 years’ of experience in drilling and well control with major and independent operators and well-control companies.