Monsopiad Village in Sabah

Kota Kinabalu City Day 1

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Half day seminar on "Drilling Engineering Overview"

I attend another talk, organized by IEM and the course name is "Drilling Engineer Overview" at Crystal Crown Hotel. The agenda for this course is background of the drilling, drilling engineer overview on how to drill, how much does it cost for drilling, and their challenges. Besides, this course taught the overview of directional drilling, casing design, cement design, and drilling fluid design.

In General, drilling is the act of making hole to provide conduit for the hydrocarbon to free flow from the reservoir to surface. The speaker talked about the background of drilling and the type of drilling rigs. This is the first time I heard about the Tender Assisted Platform Rig.

There are two types of well, Development well and Exploration/Appraisal well. The well life cycle stages consist of well construction (Design stages), implementation, analysis and improvement.

It is impossible for all the wells having vertical drilling. The reasons for having directional drilling are multiple wells (optimum location for platform), drilling in inaccessible location, drilling through faults, controlling a vertical well, sidetrack wells, salt dome and relief well (safety issue).

Cement is also one of the drilling engineer work scopes. Cement is used for isolating the formation fluids, holding casing in place, and capable of perforation to be done on the casing. Lots of cementing laboratory tests need to be done in order to meet certain objectives and requirements.

As a conclusion, drilling engineer is capable of well design, casing design, directional drilling, cement design, and drilling fluids design. They work as team work with reservoir engineers, geologists, etc.

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