Influx attenuation during mpd operations

Abstract

When a kick incident occurs on an offshore drilling rig today, the conventional well control procedures involves and relies on human skills and experience. Everything is done manually and the risk of human errors is always present. In the world of drilling, automation will become more and more common over the next years to come. Other industries such as the aviation industry have implemented automation with great success and used it for many decades already. Automation can prove very useful in the field of well control. E.g., small influxes can be automatically controlled and circulated out of the wellbore without the interference of humans. Such new automatic procedures come with benefits in form of e.g. decrease in the non productive time, and can provide a higher level of safety on a drilling rig. Automation can thus prove positive in both economical and HMS matters. To be able to get automation into the world of drilling and well control, it will require changing the whole mindset of the industry. Such a reform will challenge the already established well control strategies. The first step towards being able to start such a transformation towards automation, will be to prove successful test results from serious and promising automation research projects. This thesis presents an automatic well control procedure tested on a small scale well model at UiS.