The great Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” Albert Einstein said this in the last century. Since then people’s imaginations have come a long way. From a caveman’s painting on rocks to modern man’s sci-fi and animated movies. Imagination explodes around us.

We see imagination on a big scale, such as, NASA’s Apollo 11 – the first manned mission to land on Moon in 1969 – and on a small scale, where we use our imagination to be more creative and happier.

In art, our imagination allows us to be whoever and whatever we want to be in this world. Whatever we imagine, we can conceive and give birth to it. We can sing it in song, write it in a story or poem, draw it, paint it or even sculpt it. Through imagination, the world is literally at our fingertips.

As we grow up, we often grow out of our imagination. We are taught to stop using it. And we soon believe that we no longer have one. But we can recapture our imagination through some simple steps, such as:

• Think about something extraordinary when you wake up
• Pretend to be someone else
• Visualize things you want to create
• Wear socks that don't match
• Drive to work a different way or eat at a new restaurant
  ...

Imagination demands that we open our mind and heart and let our thoughts flow freely.

For drilling engineers, drilling software is a great tool to boost our imagination. With this tool, we can be drilling a 20,000 foot horizontal well or cementing a casing in an offshore well at a water depth of 10,000 feet, all while sitting in front of a computer screen. During the planning stage, we don't have to be on-site. A simple run of a simulation puts us on the rig floor so we can see hookload changes as it is happening. We can even modify our operational parameters (ROP, RPM, etc.) to see how they impact our drilling performance, simply by switching between input and output windows or employing a sensitivity study.

Drilling software, through 2D or 3D visual display, makes our imagination tangible and real. Sometimes it can even spot the flaw in our imagination by identifying potential problems in our drilling operation design before we execute it in the field.

Below is output from PVI’s CEMVIEW software (cementing engineering toolbox). It shows the casing configuration and wellbore schematic at each casing stage.