Author Archives: Freddie Ruiz, PVI

High Five

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The use of the expression “High Five” began in the early 70’s and it was a form of saying “way to go” for an accomplishment no matter how small or large. With this in mind, let’s take a moment to talk about one of the characteristics that also describes our software:

User Friendly | Drilling Software - Pegasus Vertex, Inc.

User-friendliness is the ease of use and learnability of a man-made object for humans to interact with, for example, a software, website, tool and a machine just to mention a few. User-friendly includes procedures of measuring usability, such as needs analyses and studies of the principles behind an object’s efficiency. When designing a software, the elegance and the clarity of its interaction with users are very essential.

The primary idea of user-friendly is divided in 3 categories:

  1. More efficient to use - it  takes less time to accomplish a particular task
  2. Easier to learn - any operation can be learned by observing the object
  3. More satisfying to use

Complex software programs find their way into everyday life and this has made user-friendly more popular in recent years, as more companies see the benefits of researching and developing their software with user-oriented methods instead of technology-oriented methods only.

The term user-friendly is often used as a synonym for usable and also refers to accessibility. It’s a description of the quality user experience. By understanding the interaction between the software and the user, we at PVI, work toward providing our customers with what they’re looking for.

When we think of user-friendly we focus on the following:

  1. Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they use the software?
  2. Efficiency: Once users have learned the software, how fast can they complete tasks?
  3. Memorability: When users return to the software after a period of not using it, how easily can they re-establish proficiency?
  4. Errors: How many errors do users make and how easily can they recover from the errors?
  5. Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the software?

User-friendly is associated with the functionalities of our software; in addition to being just a characteristic of the user interface it also separates usefulness into usability and utility. When we evaluate user interfaces for usability and utility, our definition is as simple as: effective fit for purpose and efficiency of the Interface. The term intuitive is also a fitting trait in our user-friendly interfaces, because it’s used as a synonym for learnable; where our users can learn advanced software in a very simple manner.

So basically what we want is for our customers to feel so accomplished when finishing a job that at the end of the day before they turn off their computer they say to our software: “Way to go…high five!”

Visual Thinking Equals Creativity

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Logical and visual thinking are two different mental groups that affect the way we view things.

The logical thinking involves analysis, advancement from simple to complex, organization of information and continuous reasoning. This group is influenced by hearing and language and a perception of time.

In contrast, visual thinking involves synthesis, an intuitive comprehension of complex systems, coordinated processing of concepts, inductive reasoning from the whole aspect to the small aspects, use of imagination and generation of ideas by combining existing facts in new ways, in other words, creative thinking. This group is influenced by visualization and images and a perception of space.

For the visual thinking group, concepts are rapidly understood when presented with visuals. Once the spatial thinking group has an image of a concept and sees how the information fits with what they already know, their learning ability is permanent. It’s their best learning style. To them, images are their main motivation and it is how they experience success in their own way. With this in mind, here at Pegasus Vertex, Inc. we put a lot of effort into our software development to give our clients a sophisticated visual experience of what goes on below the ground and under the sea. We use diverse visualizations, such as schematics and graphs that provide a live feed of the operations.

Highly Visual | PVI Drilling Software

Visual thinking is one of our main focuses when creating the software.

Why?

Because visuals are a more effective way in understanding the goals of the project, whether it is mud reporting, drilling hydraulics, casing wear prediction, cementing jobs, wellbore trajectory, tubing movement or split flow analysis. With creativity we give our customers the software that fits their needs.

Highly Visual | Drilling Software - Pegasus Vertex, Inc.

Safety-Minded Pilot

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Pilots who fly planes or any type of aircraft have a preflight inspection checklist consisting of more than 30 items. If the pilots do not carefully follow the checklist each time before take-off, they increase the possibility of a tragic accident. Do you know what type of pilot is specially urged to complete the checklist every time? It is the very experienced pilot! A seasoned pilot could easily skip some of the details thinking nothing is going to happen, but an experienced one takes this checklist very seriously.

Like a safety-minded pilot, service companies and drilling engineers make survey calculations that are fundamental and necessary to monitor and control wellbore trajectories. Initially, the oil and gas industry was concentrated on drilling vertical wells. The concept of inclination angle began when engineers realized that a drilled wellbore trajectory was not a plumb line. Then the concept of azimuth angle arose when they found out that a drilled trajectory can deviate from a vertical well. A wellbore trajectory is a continuous curve in space that bends and turns simultaneously.

The oil and gas industry has acknowledged the importance of survey calculation for more than 50 years and has extensively applied the research results in the field. Inclinometers can only give parameters from separate survey stations and cannot give the real profile of a wellbore trajectory. Therefore, a proper method of survey calculation must be on the basis of a 3D wellbore trajectory model. A software with the help of simple methods can be sufficiently accurate and precise for these types of well such as extended-reach wells and multi-target wells.

By combining the survey calculations with visualization technology, PVI has developed PathView (Well Path Visualization) which provides an interactive, true 3D view of single and multiple wells.PathView - Well Path Visualization Software

Some of the features included in PathView are:

  • True 3D-rendered wellpath visualization
  • Anti-collision calculation
  • Surface lease lines
  • Lithology
  • Up to 5000 rows of survey data
  • Plots specified wellbore range
  • Up to 10 sidetrack levels
  • Plots and prints detailed well profiles
  • Plan view, Section view, 3D view and Dogleg

Precautionary methods are an effective way for safety-minded pilots to buy time to reevaluate the flight conditions. Pilots, who understand their aircraft systems, follow standard operating procedures and use conservative risk management techniques, will diminish inconvenient situations from further becoming worse; just like the ability to see the well path in a 3D work space is essential for engineers to visualize the development plan, understand it and therefore, avoid well collisions.

The Whole Package in a Small Package

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The phrase “The Whole Package” is defined as:

  1. All the elements constituting a whole or occurring as a unit.
  2. Something or someone that possesses a full set of relevant characteristics.

This expression is often used to describe something that is of good choice; something that has everything that one needs for a specific matter or something that possesses all that one is searching for.

With all the advancements technology has achieved, it is marvelous how it keeps evolving in ways that are far beyond describable. Now you can have computer programs that can do multitasks; for instance, a software that possesses a full set of relevant characteristics for a specific need. It is literally getting the whole package in a small package.

The Whole Package in a Small Package

Let’s talk about one good example of this.

DEPRO, a software developed by PVI, is a complete torque, drag and hydraulics program that combines all the essential components of our TADPRO and HYDPRO software.

For torque and drag, this software eliminates and diminishes a lot of the risks in drilling, completion or any particular tool operations. It also performs comprehensive hydraulics calculations so that the downhole drilling hydraulic conditions can be examined, and potential problems can be identified in advance before field execution.

Among its many features DEPRO also includes:

  • Soft and stiff string models
  • Buckling criteria
  • Drilling, back reaming, rotating and tripping operations
  • Minimum WOB to buckle
  • Stress calculations
  • 2D/3D animations
  • Liner cementing job
  • Field data comparisons on torque, drag, ECD and SPP
  • Fixed flow rate analysis
  • Surge and swab
  • Hydraulics sensitivity analysis
DEPRO - Torque, Drag and Hydraulics

This is a good package for service companies and operators in which they can find everything that they need for their jobs to be done all in one place. In other words they can have the whole package in a small package.

Knowledge and Diderot’s Philosophy

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There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
Denis Diderot (French Philosopher)

Knowledge is defined as a familiarity, awareness or understanding of someone or something, for instance the facts, information, descriptions, or skills, which is acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovering, or learning of a subject.

In the past century technology went through many advances giving knowledge the opportunity to be more accessible to humanity. For drilling technology, literatures, books, computer programs and other sources have been put together by the brightest minds of drilling professionals; however while this technological know-how has notably driven the industry forward, some individuals are at times overwhelmed by the vast amount of information they receive from different sources of media.

The internet is loaded with drilling engineering information, but this information is scattered around in such a way that can lead to generate different answers to just one question.

The demand has been to create an all-in-one type of information and knowledge base software; a digital toolbox that is quick-to-access, reliable, accurate and interactive among other things. For this, PVI has developed a comprehensive collection of drilling engineering tools in a simple-to-learn and easy-to-use software package - Dr. DE.

Dr. DE - Drilling Engineering Toolbox

The software covers more than 180 functions ranging from the fundamentals of drilling engineering to an advanced well path design and 3D visualization of the wellbore; a resource made for every drilling engineer and technician to get the job done right while also making their engineering and sales efforts easy and efficient.

Dr. DE’s engineering features include:

  • Daily used drilling engineering problems and solutions
  • Extensive and expandable tubular, centralizer and fluid database
  • Survey data up to 5000 points
  • 3D wellbore visualization
  • Intelligent 2D well path design
  • Detailed illustrations
  • Support fraction input of tubular sizes

In the beginning of the article we quoted from Dennis Diderot, a person who strongly believed and promoted that all humans have the right to acquire knowledge because it’s in our nature to learn and that the best way of acquiring it, is through experimentation and the exercise of reasoning. With this in mind is how we developed Dr.DE and how our fellow drilling engineers and technicians can benefit from using it to accomplish their daily tasks.

An Illustration and A Twisted Finger

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Let’s illustrate in an easier way what torque and drag is:

Hold your index finger tightly in the fist of your other hand.

Now twist your finger.

Twist Your Finger and You Feel The Pain

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you feel how your finger does not want to twist?

Yes!

You know why?

Because it's not built to be twisted.

The pain you feel is because of the torque you are putting on the joints.  - That's torque.

Do you feel how your finger resists the pull because you have a good grip on it with your fist? - That's drag.

Torque and drag can have a dramatic increase in horizontal and extended-reach wells and can become the limiting factor in determining the horizontal length or extended-reach of a well. For this reason, precise calculations of torque and drag are necessary for drilling operations. Torque and drag are the results of friction caused by a moving pipe inside the wellbore: torque occurs when rotating the pipe along the wellbore and drag occurs when moving the pipe.

When drilling horizontal or extended-reach wells, excessive torque and drag may become troublesome both in the drilling operations and later in the completion operations. Estimating torque and drag is very important, but the calculation of drag in the build section of a well is complicated by the effect of the axial force (tensile or compressive) on the lateral contact force which produces the sliding drag and in turn causes changes to the axial force itself. The axial force has a great effect on the torque and drag calculations in the build section. When the axial force (tension or compression) becomes large enough to let the pipe contact only one side of the wellbore, the torque and drag in the build section will increase proportionally with the increase in the axial force.

The most common way to calculate approximate torque and drag values in the build section involves monotonous numerical calculations: dividing the build section into many small pieces, assuming the axial force remains constant in those small pieces, calculating the friction factor for each of the pieces, and then summing these values to get the total drag over the entire build section. This process is both time-consuming and difficult for field engineers.

The analysis of torque and drag is made easier by today’s technology. There is a comprehensive torque and drag software in the market that removes many of the risks during the drilling process. This software was developed by PVI and it’s called TADPRO (Torque and Drag).

TADPRO - torque and drag

This software comes with features that help users to:

  • Calculate hookload and surface torque
  • Identify potential buckling
  • Perform sensitivity analysis
  • Determine side force
  • Analyze forces downhole
  • User-friendliness and graphical outputs

Illustrations have always been a great learning method and today we have learned two things:

  1. Fingers were not made to be twisted.
  2. Likewise a pipe is not built to be twisted, but the torque and drag inevitably occurs during horizontal drilling, but with the help of TADPRO, torque and drag can be calculated and predicted, therefore the risks are reduced.

A Phrase of Being Stuck

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Jill Scott said:

“I need to find a creative diversity because if I get stuck, I get unhappy.”

At times we all find ourselves stuck in different aspects of our lives.  Maybe not for the same reason; sometimes it could be fear, guilt, nostalgia and even boredom, but the result is the same.

We’re stuck.

But then, how can we get out of it? How do we get unstuck? The answer is very simple: “we find the problem and along with it, we find the solution”. Let’s take this example and apply it to the drilling process.

During a drilling operation, if a pipe cannot be freed from the hole without causing any damages to the pipe and without exceeding the drilling rig’s maximum hook load this is considered a stuck pipe. Pipe sticking can be classified under two categories:

  1. Differential pressure pipe sticking
  2. Mechanical pipe sticking

When having complications due to a stuck pipe this can be nearly half of the total cost of the well, making stuck pipe one of the most expensive problems that can occur during a drilling operation and is a serious risk in high-angle and horizontal wells.

Drilling through depleted zones, where the pressure in the annulus surpasses that in the formation, might cause the drillstring to be pulled against the wall and embedded in the filter cake deposited there. The internal cake pressure diminishes at the point where the drillpipe contacts the filter cake, causing the pipe to be held against the wall by the differential pressure. In high-angle and horizontal wells, the gravitational force contributes to prolonged contact between the drillstring and the formation.

What are some of the mechanical causes for stuck pipe?

  • Keyseating
  • Packoff from poor hole-cleaning
  • Shale swelling
  • Wellbore collapse
  • Plastic-flowing formation (i.e., salt)
  • Bridging

What are some of the signs that need to be monitored to prevent stuck pipe?

  • Increasing in torque and drag
  • Excessive cuttings loading
  • Tight spots while tripping
  • Loss of circulation while drilling

Depending on what the suspected cause of sticking is, it is necessary to act properly and urgently.

There is a tool developed by PVI Called StuckPipePro, which is a stuck pipe analysis that every operator should have to reduce the risks of pipe sticking to the minimum. This effective tool is equipped with great features, for example: stuck chance calculation, free point calculation, back-off force calculation, stuck pipe mechanism, which assist in determining the mechanism that is actually behind the stuck pipe situation and which technique should be used to free the pipe. It also comes with a decision flow chart that guides users through a series of questions to find the cause of pipe sticking.

StuckPipePro - Stuck-pipe-analysis

StuckPipePro - Stuck Pipe Analysis

Just like the phrase of being stuck said by Jill Scott; once we find the problem, we’ll find the solution, in this case, with StuckPipePro.

Like The Barriers on The Road

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This is a story about a town located at the bottom of a deep valley.

The Vally

The only road into town was steep and windy, barely hanging on to the steep mountain-side surrounding the town. Very often, cars traveling into town would get too close to the edge of the road and tumble into the valley. Over time, the town spent hundreds of thousands of dollars responding to wrecks and they got tired of going out to respond to the same thing over and over. The town’s people rendezvoused to discuss the matter and how to solve it. Some folks thought they should ignore what was happening and let people fend for themselves. Others thought they should continue to help the people who went off the road, but should charge them for the costs involved. A few suggested that they should just close the road so those strangers wouldn't cause them any more problems. The majority of the people quickly acknowledged that the road posed a risk for strangers but also for friends, family and the townspeople themselves. Since nobody agreed to a specific solution, one person suggested they put up a barrier on the edge where cars most often went off the road and everybody agreed and so they did. Over the years, the barrier cost the community far less than all the rescuing they had been doing for so many years. A simple barrier was the solution.

It's a simple story, but a great metaphor for prevention. Like the barriers on the road, for more than 6 decades, casing centralization has been established as being essential to efficient mud removal and therefore to a successful cementing job. Prior to a production it is very common for field engineers to spend time improving casing centralization using software, particularly for highly deviated wells. However today, while long lateral wells are being drilled, they become more challenging in getting the casing to bottom and achieving good zonal isolation. That is why casing centralizers play a key role in achieving these objectives and should be evaluated differently than they have been in the past.

Predicting casing standoff is essential since not knowing where to locate the centralizers and how many are needed can cause several problems. The main reason for centralization is to ensure a uniform distribution of cement around the casing. No centralization or poor centralization will cause channeling of the cement and therefore produce poor cement adherence.

What do centralizers prevent?

  • When running a casing, the adequate use of centralizers reduces the chance of wall sticking.
  • In deviated wells because of the increased amount of support, the casing requires to stay in the center of the hole – especially in build-up sections - a more dense distribution of centralizers is required than in straight holes.

There are two main types of centralizer:

  1. Spring (Bow) Centralizers
  2. Rigid Centralizers

Spring (bow) centralizers are often used for vertical and deviated wellbores and rigid centralizers are used for horizontal wellbores. The method of installation for both of these depends entirely upon the centralizer design. However, care must be taken to ensure the quality of the cementing job. Centralizer placement is synonym of prevention.

For this PVI developed CentraDesign software that optimizes the centralizer placement, predicts casing standoff and torque and drag for extended reach drilling and deviated wellbores.

CentraDesign (Centralizer Placement)

CentraDesign also determines the number and placement of centralizers, hence providing both service companies and operators with a very sophisticated yet easy to use tool that will help prevent problems during the cementing process.

Prevention is like the barrier put up to keep cars from going over the edge and it works to keep unwanted things from happening in the first place.

The Risk of Not Keeping Risks Under Control

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American writer and best-selling author Denis Waitley said:

“Life is inherently risky. There is only one big risk you should avoid at all costs, and that is the risk of doing nothing.”

Risks are everywhere. I was watching a documentary on earthquakes and hurricanes and it got me thinking about how there are risks in everything that surrounds us, but that doesn’t stop us from improving and moving forward. We have to acknowledge that risks exist. Taking risks is in our human nature and when something goes wrong we work towards being more prepared in the future.
Some people are reluctant to take risks because they’re somewhat afraid, but the reality is that taking risks can:

  • Open people up to new challenges and opportunities.
  • Empower people to establish new limits in their minds.
  • Stimulate people to become more creative.
  • Result in positive outcomes.
  • Help people to clearly define what they’re trying to achieve.
  • And once they have become accustomed to taking risks, they break free from the average way of thinking.

In the drilling industry every step and every decision has to be made, yet it is necessary to drill for oil. As a nation on the wheel, the usage of petroleum has become an everyday thing not only for the United States but for the rest of the world as well. So basically it’s all about risk control for every aspect of life including the drilling industry, and in this case it is all about a well done cementing job.

For drilling engineers, cementing seems to be more of an art than a science or technique. Cementing is the process of displacing cement to the annular space between the well-bore and casing or to the annular space between two successive casing strings. With the latest technologies and analytical software such as CentraDesign and CEMPRO developed by PVI, cementing engineers can use these types of software to ensure a complete and proper cement displacement.

A successful cementing job is one of the most important factors in the productive life of any well. However, challenges are always coming along as the wellbore goes deeper and to the places that are harder to reach. It’s already prevalent to predict a cementing job by computing the downhole temperature and pressure. If the cementing job is well done, all the risks are under control; a longer life of the wellbore and a higher productivity is promised.
We are living in a world where technology is advancing quickly. As PVI developers we are trying our best to develop more advanced software to meet the new needs. That’s why we developed CEMPRO+, the ultimate enhanced version of PVI’s mud displacement model, CEMPRO®.

CEMPRO+ - CEMPRO with displacement efficiency

Designed for land, offshore, conventional and/or foamed operations, CEMPRO+ uses advanced numerical methods to solve momentum and continuity equations on 3D grids and calculates the fluid concentration as well as the displacement efficiency. It accounts for many factors that can affect the efficiency of displacement jobs, including fluid properties, pumping rates, casing standoff and complex wellbore geometry.

3D Plot of Velocity Profile - CEMPRO+

Although taking risks requires some blind trust in most cases, with a well done cementing job, drilling does not need to be a problem, but the complete opposite. We’ll never know what we can accomplish until we take the risks, and we can always get the best rewards by finding the right solutions or tools to keep the risks under control.

Looking for The Right Key

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“Many people are confused with complexity and shy off from it. Strangely, complexity arises from simple rules, but people are finding it difficult to grasp. However, you need to move out of this situation soon before it gets out of control. Do what ants do: they diverge to look for new sources of food and then converge once a new path has been identified. Look for new ideas till you identify a new path or a new pattern to help you find the right key for the right lock that opens up the right door.”

        - Ali Anami

As the 21st century passes, the oil industry continues to look for new ways to innovate and increase its productions. It continues to search for reserves in more complex environments, especially in deep water. Already many fields are slated for development in both shallow and deep offshore wells and new solutions and technology are needed to meet these goals.

As a reservoir depletes, the pressure and production rates decline and lost circulation or differential sticking problems can prevent the drilling operations from increasing their production. Underbalanced drilling (UBD) is a practical method to drill in such depleted or low-pressure areas. One of the many benefits of underbalanced drilling is that it can prevent or reduce near wellbore permeability damage; as a result, it enhances the production, delaying water, gas or oil leaks due to the lower pressure drop that is required for the same flow rates.

The advantages of Underbalanced Drilling are:
  • Improves drilling performance
  • Increases penetration rate (ROP)
  • Extends bit life
  • Minimizes differential sticking of pipe
  • Diminishes lost circulation
  • Reduces formation damage
  • Simplifies early production while drilling
  • Allows formation evaluation and tests while drilling
  • Higher productivity completions
  • Picks total depth (TD) from inflow performance
  • Closed, pressure-controlled system

In order to design and achieve a successful underbalanced drilling project many important elements must be taken in consideration and there are 4 steps that have to be applied to determine the options and requirements for UBD: This is particularly important for underbalanced drilling operations offshore from floating vessels, where critical issues can increase significantly.

  1. Determine Bottom Hole Pressure (BHP) requirements.
  2. Identify the drilling fluid options.
  3. Establish the well design and perform flowing modeling.
  4. Select the surface equipment.

An advance software model has been developed which incorporates these elements, including multiphase flow calculations, gas and liquid injection rate optimization, hydrostatic gradient and frictional pressure loss calculations, cuttings transport, reservoir fluid influx (oil, gas, or water), and operational procedures such as tripping and liquid unloading.

Just like the rest of PVI's software, UBDPRO is the right tool when it comes to increasing a well’s productivity. It’s all about looking in the right direction (for the right key) and making the efforts to obtain it.

UBDPRO - Underbalanced Drilling Hydraulics