Abstract
Drilling narrow window wells conventionally have been well known to cause major wellbore issues to the Operator in the Gulf of Thailand. Therefore, managed pressure drilling (MPD) has been deployed since several years ago to mitigate the drilling problems. To ensure safety and optimize drilling time, it is necessary to identify the actual pore pressure while drilling wells with narrow marginin order to eliminate kick, ballooning and loss events.
The use of automated MPD system to precisely control bottomhole pressure (BHP) during connections combined withthe evaluation of bottom up gas trend while drilling enabled the pore pressure to be predicted accurately in almost real-time condition without the need to stop drilling in the Gulf of Thailand. Thus, the narrow window wells were drilled faster with MPD, which was beneficial for the Operator in the area where the fast factory drilling was necessary to make wells more economical. Furthermore, the use of this new method in effectively determining the actualpore pressure provided solutions to the Operator in mitigating wellbore issues at the same time improving drilling timeafter several years of MPD technology implementations. The estimated pore pressure results acquired with the new methodon several narrow window wells were even comparable to the actual wireline logging measurement results.
The objective of this paper is to introduce an effective and efficient method in determining pore pressure (PP) while drilling challenging wells with tight reservoir characteristic by utilizing MPD technology in the Gulf of Thailand. In addition, this paper also describes the drilling strategy, detail procedure and lesson learnedin verifying pore pressure with the new method.
