Measurement While Drilling, Logging While Drilling, and Rotary Steerable Systems Performance, Benefits, and Challenges in Managed Pressure Drilling and Underbalanced Drilling

Abstract Drilling engineers have been calculating hydrostatic pressure greater than reservoir pressure in almost all conventional drilling applications. This has resulted in various drilling challenges, such as reduced rate of penetration, differential sticking, mud losses, formation damage, wellbore stability, and formation fracture and associated cost. Managed pressure drilling (MPD) and underbalanced drilling (UBD) have played a vital role to significantly minimize these drilling problems onshore as well as offshore. Since most of the wells being drilled today include measurement-while-drilling (MWD), logging-while-drilling (LWD), and rotary steerable system (RSS) tools, the interface between these tools with MPD and UBD technologies has become extremely critical not only to understand but also to execute. These logging and steering tools have huge proven combined benefits in both MPD and UBD environments. The performance of all these tools in MPD and UBD environments is influenced by different challenges in terms of data transmission (mud pulse telemetry), hydraulics, steerability, and maintenance.