Work-based learning (WBL) is a collaborative tool employed by educational institutions and industry to educate and develop their students or workforce in all three strands of learning: for, at, and through work. This paper presents petroleum engineering WBL models designed using Merrill's First Principles of Instruction for university-employer partnership programmes to meet the specific needs of employers and individual students. These models integrated activities and assessment for learning and provided experiences where WBL is used as the principal means for bringing about change in the workplace and student competency as future engineers. The models are a learning approach that exposes students to a wider industry partner to build up client-facing experience throughout their degree. This is aligned with key employability skills, which are highly valued in the job market. The results indicated that the WBL approach requires active involvement of students, educational institutions, and employers in course design, and that the WBL approach has increased professionalism and motivation among students, as well as significantly increasing graduate employability by addressing persistent skills gaps and meeting business needs. In conclusion, the WBL models demonstrated positive implications, widening access to higher education and enabling employers to shape their workforce in line with business demands while offering a high-value, low-cost option to upskill staff.
In recent times, the oil industry has shown increasing awareness towards maintaining optimum well productivity through better HP-HT drilling/completion fluids design. However, the mechanisms of drilling fluid filtration and impact on productivity performance are not well understood, especially in an HP-HT environment. In open hole completions the productivity losses are critical because the near-wellbore damage is not by-passed by perforations. Furthermore, a satisfactory model for field applications to simulate the near-wellbore damage in terms of well flow performance from laboratory core test analysis still is not available. In this paper, the results of in-depth experimental research into rheology, filtration and formation damage phenomena and the relationships between them. The experimental data combined with data analysis of static and dynamic filtration models provided the database for the semi-empirical mechanistic models that were developed. These models have been combined and incorporated into a design and evaluation tool - the productivity tool, for predicting the effect of HP-HT drilling fluid filtration on formation productivity. A number of results have been presented to illustrate how the new tool can be used to evaluate the damage factor of a given fluid, specify the invaded zone skin as well as the depth of invasion, two key parameters that are useful and relevant to optimum fluid selection and management in addition to well test data interpretation. Introduction The most common source of formation damage has proved to be drilling operations1. Permeability is a characteristic of the formation, and can be altered by solids and mud filtrate invasion during drilling operations. Drilling fluids are used to facilitate various drilling processes. Drilling mud filtrate will invade the formation to a greater depth than drilling mud particles. A decrease of the permeability (formation damage), results in a decrease of the well productivity2,3. The formation damage depends upon many parameters such as formation characteristics, type, composition, filtration and rheological characteristics of drilling fluid and operating conditions (overbalance pressure, time, etc.). A key parameter in quantifying formation damage is the skin factor4. The skin factor estimated from well test data is used in the flow equations to estimate the production rate in wells that are affected by formation damage. Generally, when rating performance of various drill-in fluid formulations, the permeability damage evaluation is quantified through oil return permeability measurements and flow-initiation pressures performed on core samples damaged during mud filtration tests5,6. Extensive laboratory studies of formation damage and several modeling efforts for prediction of formation damage have been reported in the literature. Most of the previous studies have focused on formation damage from filtration of WBM and incompressible fluids in LP-LT applications. Few attempts were made to transfer these laboratory data into a near-wellbore model to evaluate the permeability damage. Liu et al.7 simulated formation damage by fluid injection and mud filtration while Scott Lane8 and Semmelbeck at al.9 simulated filtrate invasion for improving log interpretation, but their impact on well performance was not investigated. Some workers10,11 studied well performance using representative formation damage, but laboratory tests were not integrated in their studies. The economic impacts of wellbore formation damage justify a thorough study of this problem in order to find ways to minimize its effect on well performance. This paper presents a productivity tool for screening different HP-HT drilling fluids (WBM and OBM), which specify the invaded zone skin as well as the depth of invasion, and evaluates the damage factor of a given fluid in terms of inflow performance.
This paper establishes drilling surveillance interpretation and monitoring techniques for digital drilling data which can be used to support drilling forensics and improve drilling performance. One significant advancement in the last 20 years has been the widespread availability and use of sensors to monitor all aspects of the drilling process. The majority of sensors will take surface and downhole data at several hundred samples per second, process the data and store a record at one sample per second. The data from these sensors are collated and processed using some form of Electronic Data Recording system. The information is subsequently displayed in realtime and stored for offsite transmittal. This paper extensively evaluates the impact on drilling performance due to how data from such sensors are collected, processed and the information displayed. A number of observations are investigated, analyzed and explained identifying how data quality, consistency, frequency, sensor errors and data artefacts can skew the displayed results. This can critically impact the drilling forensic analysis and subsequent interpretation. Failing to account for these data quality issues in realtime may mask drilling dysfunction causing accelerated damage to the drill bit and drilling assembly. This paper also aims to highlight techniques for displaying and interpreting drilling data to enhance drilling performance as well as diagnose dysfunction during reviews of historic wells. Understanding these limitations in advance and incorporating them in a team's surveillance strategy can help with the diagnosis of drilling dysfunction and aid performance improvement. These recommended practices have been developed to offer a foundation for drilling surveillance, interpretation and monitoring as well as training for the industry. They have been created such that they can grow organically and may be used for developing subsequent industry publications. The work described in this paper is part of a joint International Association of Drilling Contactors (IADC) / Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) industry effort to revise the IADC dull grade process.
Summary The drilling industry is striving to be more efficient, reducing time, costs, and emissions to provide energy solutions for a more climate-conscious world. Reducing nonproductive time (NPT) and invisible lost time (ILT) by utilizing modeling software to optimize tripping operations is one method to combat this. Additional factors such as sea heave have a significant impact on tripping operations on semisubmersible drilling vessels, which do not show a linear response to increased heave. These vessels have compensation systems, but they are often not in use or not completely accurate. Typical heave experienced in the North Sea is between 0.5 and 3-m amplitude and 10–30-second heave period. In this study, transient modeling software is used to create a digital twin of the wellbore to safely predict the tripping speed and define the effect heave has on the tripping operations, from causing additional swab and surge pressures when in or out of slips to reducing tripping speed and improving efficiency by reducing mud gelling at connections. To further understand the effect heave has on tripping operations, experimental simulations of varying heave magnitude were completed in wellbore sections of 0°, 30°, 60°, and 90° inclination. Model validation was completed before running simulations. The results indicate that in horizontal holes, low heave magnitudes result in no bit or pressure response. The same cannot be said for vertical wells, which show smooth bit movement and pressure response throughout the heave magnitude spectrum. However, in a horizontal hole when the wave height is of a larger magnitude, sufficient to break wellbore friction, bit displacement is observed to display jerky axial stick and slip movement, and resultant increased swab and surge pressures are shown even when accounting for the reduced pressure fluctuations due to string eccentricity in an inclined wellbore. It is proposed that much of the related mechanical and pressure response is due to the properties of the drilling mud, string elasticity, and the forced frequency of the waves on the natural frequency of the drilling rig and drillstring. It is clear from definitive and experimental simulations that extra care must be taken when the heave is significant to maintain wellbore stability and reduce wellbore pressure cycling.
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