Abstract
Apart from its main task of creating the wellbore, the drill bit can act as valuable field laboratory with no changes in design or data gathering procedure required. Automatically and on every well, the drilling rig captures critical information such as weight on bit and torque for calculating the forces being applied to remove the rock ahead of the bit. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate a physics-based method to utilize this data to gather a full understanding of the reservoir.
Over the past few years, drilling data has been compared against a wide catalog of core measured and log derived geomechanical properties from reservoirs around the world. Concurrently, core testing, well data, and literature review have illustrated the effects of overpressure on sonic and geomechanical properties. The results of these studies have resulted in physics-based models to transform digital drilling data to high resolution geomechanical logs and pressure models.
This method has been applied to more than 100 wells around the world to address various problems related to drilling and completions optimization. Some wells were drilled decades ago with available data including subsets of triple combo logs, digital drilling data, sonic logs, and more advanced logging suites.
Non-productive time, side tracked wells, and over-capitalized completions represent enormous drains on operator budgets. Anywhere a well has been drilled, data exists to combat these issues and every new well adds to this dataset representing an opportunity to improve understanding of the reservoir. In addition to preventing wellbore problems, this understanding can help operators optimize well locations, curve generation, lateral targets, completion programs, and ultimately well recoveries using data that is already available and routinely gathered.
