Evaluation of kick and loss scenarios in experimental lab facility

Abstract

Detection and evaluation of gain and loss situations is crucial for safety during drilling operations. During managed pressure drilling there is higher risk of kicks than during traditional drilling. Early stage detection and evaluation are of importance in order to avoid situations that can evolve into critical incidents. The main focus in the project will be to detect and evaluate kick and loss during drilling operations, primarily based on experiments performed on small scale lab. facility. Experiments will be performed with the intention to investigate how different influx- and loss scenarios will affect the flow- and pressure responses in the system. Pressure transmitters installed in the system are used in comparison to pumprate and Coriolis flowrate. The results from the experiments are used to correlate the different pressure readings to each other, and to determine the relation between flow- and pressure responses for different scenarios. The results show that pressure transmitters measure a larger relative change in pressure compared to the relative change in flowrate obtained from Coriolis data. This indicates that monitoring pressure changes in the system can be an effective way to detect gain- or loss situations.