Developing a Managed Pressure Drilling Strategy for Casing Drilling Operations

Casing drilling can be an effective method of reducing drilling costs and minimising drilling problems but its uptake around the world has been slow with only a few wells drilled so far with casing. Complex geological features like the high overburden on top of shallow unconsolidated reservoirs characteristic of offshore West Africa can benefit from casing drilling when effectively combined with Managed Pressure Drilling technique. For the industry to develop a managed pressure drilling capability that will allow today’s generation of complex wells to be drilled safely with casing, it is necessary to develop models that include the effect of eccentricity , rotation and fluid rheology at bottom hole conditions on flow and pressure regimes, and to embed these models within an easy to use, intuitive well design package for pre planning and as a real time tool to monitor and provide forward simulations based on real time rig and downhole data. The paper presents new results of the theoretical predictions of the wellbore pressure regimes incurred when different types of drilling fluid flows in concentric and eccentric horizontal annuli. The concentric and eccentric casing drilling results are compared with parallel predictions from conventional drillstring results from developed analytical solutions integrated into the VisWELL(DeskTop Simulator) , which is used in simulating well operations.