![]() ![]() Ĭombined, these survey tools and BHA designs made directional drilling possible, but it was perceived as arcane. In a May, 1934, Popular Science Monthly article, it was stated that "Only a handful of men in the world have the strange power to make a bit, rotating a mile below ground at the end of a steel drill pipe, snake its way in a curve or around a dog-leg angle, to reach a desired objective." Eastman Whipstock, Inc., would become the world's largest directional company in 1973. This capacity to quickly drill multiple relief wells and relieve the enormous gas pressure was critical to extinguishing the Conroe fire. The innovation allowed rapid drilling of a series of slanted wells. He had started his company in 1931 when he mated a drilling rig to a truck and a power take-off assembly. Failing had recently patented a portable drilling truck. Hines of Long Beach, California, became pioneers in directional drilling when they and George Failing of Enid, Oklahoma, saved the Conroe, Texas, oil field. Counter-experience had also given early directional drillers ("DD's") principles of BHA design and drilling practice that would help bring a crooked hole nearer the vertical. Prior experience with rotary drilling had established several principles for the configuration of drilling equipment down hole ("bottom hole assembly" or "BHA") that would be prone to "drilling crooked hole" (i.e., initial accidental deviations from the vertical would be increased). A series of consecutive surveys are needed to track the progress and location of a wellbore. These three components combined are referred to as a "survey". Three components are measured at any given point in a wellbore in order to determine its position: the depth of the point along the course of the borehole (measured depth), the inclination at the point, and the magnetic azimuth at the point. Sperry did this under contract to Sun Oil (which was involved in a lawsuit as described above), and a spin-off company " Sperry Sun" was formed, which brand continues to this day, absorbed into Halliburton. The next advance was in the modification of small gyroscopic compasses by the Sperry Corporation, which was making similar compasses for aeronautical navigation. In certain circumstances, magnetic fields could be used, but would be influenced by metalwork used inside wellbores, as well as the metalwork used in drilling equipment. Measuring the azimuth (direction with respect to the geographic grid in which the wellbore was running from the vertical), however, was more difficult. Measuring the inclination of a wellbore (its deviation from the vertical) is comparatively simple, requiring only a pendulum. Horizontal directional drill rigs are developing towards large-scale, micro-miniaturization, mechanical automation, hard stratum working, exceeding length and depth oriented monitored drilling. Initially, proxy evidence such as production changes in other wells was accepted, but such cases fueled the development of small diameter tools capable of surveying wells during drilling. This realization was quite slow, and did not really grasp the attention of the oil industry until the late 1920s when there were several lawsuits alleging that wells drilled from a rig on one property had crossed the boundary and were penetrating a reservoir on an adjacent property. ![]() Probably, the first requirement was the realization that oil wells, or water wells, do not necessarily need to be vertical. Many prerequisites enabled this suite of technologies to become productive. It can be broken down into four main groups: oilfield directional drilling, utility installation directional drilling, directional boring (horizontal directional drilling - HDD), and surface in seam (SIS), which horizontally intersects a vertical bore target to extract coal bed methane. Directional drilling would be used to target the gas and oil reservoir.ĭirectional drilling (or slant drilling) is the practice of drilling non-vertical bores. Because gas floats above oil, the thin red contour line marks the gas/oil contact zone. The thin red circular contour line in the middle of the map indicates the top of the oil reservoir. This fault line is between the blue/green contour lines and the purple/red/yellow contour lines. The left-to-right gap, near the top of the contour map indicates a fault line. A structure map generated by contour map software for an 8,500-foot-deep (2,600 m) gas and oil reservoir in the Erath field, Vermilion Parish, Erath, Louisiana. ![]()
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