Interactive Drilling Fast Track Oilfield Development

This conference addressed a theme that is of great strategic importance, and represents a major industrial challenge to the entire petroleum industry. Organized by the IFP in association with its Beicip-Franlab subsidiary, this event involved specialists from Agip, BP Amoco, Elf, Geoservices, Statoil, and TotalFina. To accelerate the development of oil fields, it is vital to minimise the time between the discovery of a field and when it goes into production. This means that new strategies for the development of oil fields must be implemented, including the establishment of far closer ties with the reserve assessment stage. This approach, known as "fast track development", opens up new prospects for drilling and hence, new technological challenges. The aim of interactive drilling is to remove geological uncertainties while drilling progresses, so as to better direct the well itself to the production zones. This involves completely re-thinking the interactive procedures that link drilling measurements to the geological models or reservoirs that were the starting point for scheduling the well drilling. Moreover, new measurement techniques must be developed to improve the understanding of geological formations. The results of this work will considerably influence the technical programme that is adopted for drilling wells in the future. This development will be appreciated to its full extent with the exploration of deep and very deep offshore fields, where rates of return are always linked to maximised recovery and production.