Section O: Oil and Gas Industry

Course O03: Directional Drilling Basics

Topic O03-0: Introduction to Directional Drilling
Competency O03-0-01: Understands the history of directional drilling

Historical Development of Directional Drilling

People have been drilling holes in the ground for over 2000 years. By the beginning of
the 3rd century A.D. wells were being drilled up to 140 meters deep with a Percussion
Drill. This drilling technique can still be seen in China today, when rural framers drill
water wells. The drill bit is made of iron and the pipe is made from bamboo. The rig was
also constructed from bamboo: one or more men stands on a wooden plank lever, much
like a seesaw, and this lifts up the drill stem a meter or so. The pipe is allowed to drop,
and the drill bit crashes down into the rock, pulverizing it. Inch by inch, month by
month, the drilling slowly progressed.

Percussion Drill used by the Chinese since 3 A.D.

Back in the 1800’s, the Chinese were the first ones to start drilling for oil. They used a
device called a “Cable Drill” which was a modified percussion drill. What they would do is
pull up a heavy weight and drop it. They would continually do this to pound down the
rock until they made a hole. It was effective but it certainly wasn’t very efficient and
didn’t work all that well as a “drilling” technique.

That technology was transferred into the southern United States. What they would do is
look for spotting or oil samples on the surface and that’s where they would drill. If the
oil was showing on the surface they assumed it would be directly below. They would
bring out these “Cable Drills” and pound a hole until they reached a zone where they
could actually see the oil flowing up through the hole they had made. It was a slow
process and was fairly inaccurate.

Rotary Drilling
Moving ahead 30 – 40 years to the advent of “Rotary Drilling” where they developed
drilling bits and developed the technique of spinning the drill string with the bit in a
rotary fashion and that with the heavy weight would grind the rock or literally crush the
rock. As the rock would fracture, there was drilling fluid pump through the bit to move
the rock away from the face of the bit and off to the side. The drilling fluid then lifts the
cuttings up to the surface. This was possible because the drill bit was always a bigger
diameter than the drill pipe it is attached to. This creates less friction and also a space
on either side of the drill pipe for the drilling fluid (mud) and cuttings to return to the
surface. This space is referred to as the “annulus”. The drilling fluid or “mud” not only
removes the cuttings up the annulus and out of the hole, it also cools the bit from the
friction created by grinding against the rock. As the bit is turning, it’s crushing more rock
and creating more of the cuttings. This sped up the drilling process and people were
starting to drill deeper, further and faster.

Where to Drill?
They would drill down and strata graphically all the formations will form a trend. So if
there is a hill on the surface, there will be hills in the strata below and at some point one
of those hills will create a trap. Then that trap will contain oil or gas. That was one
theory, the other theory was there were faults where the ground has actually shifted
down to create a shelf or a trap that could contain the oil or gas.

On surface they could locate oil with a hit and miss chance.

People drilled this way for 50 years and understood that if there was a valley or a dome
on the surface, they would place a drilling rig in this location. There had to be a better
way to determine where the oil and gas were.

Seismic
In 1900, Reginald Fessenden, chief physicist for the Submarine Signaling Co. of Boston,
used sound waves to measure water depths and to detect icebergs. In 1913, seismic
instruments he invented were used to record both refractions and reflections through
Earth formations near Framingham, Massachusetts. In September 1917, the U.S. Patent
Office issued a patent for “Method and Apparatus for Locating Ore Bodies.”
He came up with an idea of setting off an explosive charge and placed microphones in
the ground around the area. The sound waves from the explosion would go down catch
the dome and reflect back at a certain angle and be picked up by the microphones. By
watching the response of the microphones and correlating them all together in one
continuous strip chart, they were able to produce an image of what’s below the surface
of the earth. The setting of an explosion and monitoring the acoustic pulses that come
back was the advent of seismic.

In 1924, the discovery of an oil field beneath the Nash salt dome in Brazoria County,
Texas, was the first to be based on single-fold seismic data. Previously, oilfield
exploration was very much a guessing game based on surface signs. Stakes were high,
and rewards could be tremendous, but losses from dry holes could be devastating. Then,
engineers and geoscientists discovered that they could use low-frequency sound waves
to map subsurface geologic structures and locate possible hydrocarbon traps.
The popularity of this technology grew and oil companies starting using seismic to locate
the domes and strategically placed the drilling rigs above them. This greatly increased
the chances of hitting the target or the zone. They could find a zone that was a half a
kilometer wide and place numerous rigs above the target and drill down to find the oil.
What they were finding is that this didn’t always work. They knew the oil or gas was
down there and they would place the drilling rig right above the zone and drill down and
get nothing. What they determined was that the drill bit was catching the different
formations on the way down and actually deflecting the direction they were drilling. They
were now going off course and completely missing the zone.

Advent of Directional Drilling

In earlier times, directional drilling was used primarily as a remedial operation, either to
sidetrack around struck tools, bring the well bore back to vertical, or in drilling relief
wells to kill blowouts. Interest in controlled directional drilling began about 1929 after
new and rather accurate means of measuring hole angle was introduced during the
development of Seminole, Oklahoma field.

Acid Etch Clinometer

The first application of oil well surveying occurred in the Seminole field of Oklahoma
during the late 1920's. A sub-surface geologist found it extremely difficult to develop
logical contour maps on the oil sands or other deep key beds. The acid etch clinometer
was introduced into the area and disclosed the reason for the problem; almost all the
holes were crooked, having as much as 50 degrees inclination at some checkpoints.
The acid etch clinometer was a simple surveying device based on a measurement inside
the drill string with an acid bottle.
The process consisted of taking a test tube of etched glass and filling it half way with a
4% hydrofluoric acid solution. Then, placing it in a pressurized vessel or container and
lowering it down the center of the drill string. Once it was at the bottom of the drill
string, they would let it sit for a half an hour. They would then pull the container out of
the hole and the acid would have etched a line in the glass tube. They took a protractor
and noticed that they were drilling off course so many degrees. This is when they
confirmed that when you drill a hole in the ground, it will rarely stay straight. The was
an significant discovery because it was inconceivable that 8” drill pipe would bend and
twist down hole and come out of the hole straight. In a deep hole, etching time
(stationary) was increased to equal the time required to lower the device to the
measurement depth, which could be up to 2 hours, because the acid used neutralizes in
4 hours.

This etched glass technology gave the drilling industry the ability to determine the angle
the drill pipe was drilling down hole. They refer to this angle as “inclination”. Inclination
is the deflection from vertical and this was the first directional drilling parameter they
were able to measure. Some people may refer to inclination as “drift”. If you hang a
plumb, gravity will force it vertical towards the center of the earth. The inclination of the
well bore is the number of degrees it is deflected from that vertical position. We now
know the angle or inclination that the well bore is being drilled but what direction are we
drilling? The inclination could be pointing anywhere in a 360 degree circle. From a
compass heading, we still don’t know where we’re drilling because we don’t know what
direction we’ve deflected.
Directional Inclinometer with Magnetic Needle
In the spring of 1929 a directional inclinometer with a magnetic needle was brought into
the field. Holes that indicated an inclination of 45 degrees with the acid bottle were
actually 10 or 11 degrees less in deviation. The reason was that the acid bottle-reading
chart had not been corrected for the meniscus distortion caused by capillary pull. Thus
better and more accurate survey instruments were developed over the following years.
The use of these inclination instruments and the results obtained showed that in most of
the wells surveyed, drill stem measurements had very little relation to the true vertical
depth reached, and that the majority of the wells were “crooked”. Some of the wells
were inclined as much as 38° off vertical. Directional drilling was employed to straighten
crooked holes.
In the early 1930’s the first controlled directional well was drilled in Huntington Beach,
California. The well was drilled from an onshore location into offshore oil sands using
whipstocks, knuckle joints and spudding bits. An early version of a single shot
instrument was used to orient the whipstock.

Advent of Controlled Directional Drilling

Controlled directional drilling was initially used in California for unethical purposes such
as to intentionally cross property lines. Many legal entanglements developed when it was
established through directional surveys that oil was being removed from productive
zones in areas that the well owners had no rights to.
Controlled directional drilling had received rather unfavorable publicity until it was used
to kill a well near Conroe, Texas in 1934. The Madeley No.1 had been spudded a few
weeks earlier and for a while everything had been going normally. But on a cold, wet,
dreary day the well developed a high pressure leak on it’s casing, and before long, the
escaping pressure created a monstrous crater that swallowed up the rig.
The crater, approximately 170 feet across and of unknown depth, filled with oil mixed
with sand in which oil boiled up constantly at the rate of 6000 barrels per day. As if that
were not enough, the pressure began to channel through upper formations and started
coming to surface around neighboring wells, creating a very bad situation.
An engineer working for one of the major oil companies in Conroe suggested that an
offset well be drilled and deviated so that it would bottom out near the borehole of the
cratered well. Then mud under high pressure could be pumped down this offset well and
control the blowout.
The suggestion was approved and the project was completed successfully. As a result
directional drilling became established as one way to overcome wild wells.

Single-shot and Multi-shot

Single-shot and multi-shot surveys are run inside the drill pipe. A spear-like device with
a thin retrieval wire is dropped into the drill pipe and sinks to the bottom of the
drillstring. After it reaches bottom, a time delayed camera or mechanical pendulum is
activated and a measurement is taken. The survey tool can be retrieved. If a compass
type device is run, a non-magnetic (“monel”) drill collar is required.
On a vertical well, directional data is used to see if the well is in fact vertical. If the well
course is deviated more than 3 or 4 degrees from the vertical, problems like key seating
may cause trouble when tripping or when running wireline logs.

Improve the Surveying Technology for Better Well Control

During this time, they wanted a more sophisticated way of taking these surveys. So
what they developed was a single shot and multishot cameras. It’s a camera with a disc
film in the shape of a silver dollar. In between it and a light bulb is a gimbaled pendulum
with a set of cross hairs on it and a floating compass. It has a timer on it that turns the
light on an exposes a shadow on the film. They would still have to wireline this survey
device in and out of the hole every time they took a survey, but it was an improvement
on the technology. The main problem with technology at this point was the amount of
“down time” for the rig. You had to stop drilling for 1 to 4 hours every time you took a
survey and if it didn’t turn out you had to do it again. This “down time” for the rig is very
costly and if you are doing surveys, you’re not drilling.

You also have not control over the well bore because drilling fluids are not being pumped
down hole to clean out the cuttings and they start to settle around the drill bit. The drill
string could just be sitting in the hole for hours and the longer you sit there without
pumping drilling fluids, the more likely the whole drill string would become stuck in the
hole. Not only that, the drilling fluids or mud controls the gas or oil that is under
pressure and wants to force itself up the annulus and out of the hole. This is known as a
“kick” and can create an explosive and dangerous situation on surface. Also, when you
are not continually “cleaning” the hole by pumping drilling fluids you can become
differentially stuck with your drill string. Differential sticking is a condition in which the
drill stem becomes stuck against the wall of the well bore because part of the drill stem
(usually the drill collars) has become embedded in the filter cake. Necessary conditions
for differential pressure sticking, or wall sticking, are a permeable formation and a
pressure differential across a nearly impermeable filter cake and drill stem. A filter cake
is the layer of concentrated solids from the drilling mud that forms on the walls of the
borehole opposite permeable formations. A wall cake is important so you don’t lose your
drilling fluids through permeable formations. But a wall cake that’s too thick can get you
stuck in the hole. They do have a bottom hole assembly component called a “jar” that
can sometimes get you unstuck. Other times you can jar on the drill string and it ends
up breaking off down hole, leaving your bottom hole assembly buried. You then cement
the bottom hole assembly in the hole and have the directional drillers drill around it with
a new bottom hole assembly to get to the target.

So every time you take a survey, you run the risk of losing the well because you stop
drilling and are not pumping drilling fluids.

Advent of Measurement While Drilling

The industry needed a tool that could measure the information accurately and
communicate it in real time. “We need to take these measurements while we’re drilling”.
What special device could be used to communicate the information to surface? You
couldn’t run a cable all the way down the hole due to the fact that you are connecting
new drill pipe approximately every 10 meters. Logistically, considering other problems
that could arise from running a cable down hole, it just wouldn’t be feasible.
Originally, they used a battery operated mechanical device to communicate the
information as a series of pulses up to the surface. The measurement while drilling
(MWD) tool would work fine on surface when testing it. But when you got it down hole
and started drilling with it. No information was sent and the tool was “dead”. When the
tool arrived at the surface, there was nothing left but a pile of nuts and bolts and twisted
metal. Mechanical moving parts or anything subject to the down hole vibration of drilling
wasn’t going to work. So they had to go to a solid state device.

In the early 1980’s the technology was available from military guidance systems that
could be using to create a MWD tool. Military cruise missiles contained sensors called
accelerometers and magnetometers that could measure inclination, azimuth and
eventually would produce tool faces for directional drilling. These were good solid state,
no moving parts sensors. The measurement while drilling tool was now a success.

The measurement while drilling tool is one of the reasons that directional drilling is so
successful today.