OPEC’s easing of production cuts originally planned for January may be delayed until mid-2021 because of the global increases in COVID-19 cases occurring in November. As restrictions are renewed, extended, or newly instated, fuel demand is expected to decrease. Following a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) meeting on 16 November, OPEC Secretary General Mohammed Sanusi Barkindo underscored the need to remain “vigilant and diligent” in the months ahead. The JTC recommended that supply increases be postponed from 3 to 6 months. The OPEC ministers plan to hold an online meeting on 30 November to decide on production levels among the 13 member countries.

Today, drill bits and mud motor issues can account for more than half of the reasons for pulling out of hole before total depth (TD) on directional drilling wells. The complete paper presents a methodology designed for optimally matching drill bits, mud motors, and bottomhole-assembly (BHA) components for reduced failure risks and improved drilling performance. Work Flow The overall work flow includes detailed modeling of each sophisticated component and an algorithm to combine them efficiently at the system level without ­losing their specific nature. The drill-bit model is created in 4D—3D space modeling plus the transient behavior with time. The detailed cutting structure model may include specifying the number of cutters and how to place them in a 3D cutter space.

Achieving and sustaining performance drilling’s intended benefits—improved drilling efficiency with minimal downhole tool failures and the associated reductions in project cycle time and operational costs—requires new protocols in drilling-system analysis. Drilling-system components [bits, reamers, bottomhole assemblies (BHAs), drive systems, drilling parameters, and hydraulics] must be analyzed independently for their relevance on the basis of application types and project challenges. Additionally, the drilling system must undergo holistic evaluations to establish functional compatibility and drilling-parameter responses and effects, considering project objectives and key performance indicators. This comprehensive physics-based approach ensures durability and rate-of-penetration (ROP) improvements without compromising stability and downhole tool reliability. The success of this process is strongly dependent on vibration control.

Implementing a physics-based digital twin of a drilling system can enable the drilling team to leverage data at each stage of the engineering process to deliver more-consistent, repeatable drilling performance and improved borehole quality, which in turn enables drilling farther and faster while increasing downhole tool life. The complete paper discusses a new performance-evaluation methodology that combines bottomhole assembly (BHA) modeling with field data. BHA modeling simulates the drilling process accurately to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to help optimize BHA designs to deliver improvements in drilling performance and wellbore quality. The model also can estimate quantities such as microtortuosity that are not directly measured by standard equipment. Importance of Effective BHA Performance Evaluation Determining the cumulative effect of BHA behavior during drilling on the quality of the wellbore and the subsequent impact on performance and life of the BHA is an important goal for improving overall drilling and well-delivery efficiencies.

The authors first describe the similarities and differences of a BHA and a stringed instrument. The string of a violin, for example, typically has two fixed nodal points: the first at the bridge, which does not change, and the second at the position of the musician’s finger, which is moved along the fingerboard in order to play notes of different frequencies. The finger pressing on the string causes it to have zero displacement at that location, which defines a nodal point. Additional nodal points may occur in the motion of the string as harmonics of the fundamental mode, but these are not considered to be fixed nodes because the amplitudes of the harmonics vary. The string is relatively flexible, so it can be described adequately with a second-order differential equation. This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper SPE 197231, “Recognition and Mitigation of the Bottomhole Assembly Lateral Vibration Chatter Mode,” by Jeffrey R. Bailey, SPE, and Harshit Lathi, ExxonMobil, and Matthew T. Prim, SPE, ADNOC, et al., prepared for the 2019 Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference, Abu Dhabi, 11–14 November. The paper has not been peer reviewed.

In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the oil and gas industry, regulators, and other stakeholders recognized the need for increased collaboration and data sharing to augment their ability to better identify safety risks and address them before an accident occurs. The SafeOCS program is one such collaboration between industry and government. It is a voluntary confidential reporting program that collects and analyzes data to advance safety in oil and gas operations on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). The US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) established the program with input from industry and then entered into an agreement with the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) to develop, implement, and operate the program. As a principal statistical agency, BTS has considerable data-collection-and-analysis expertise with near-miss reporting systems for other industries and the statutory authority to protect the confidentiality of the reported information and the reporter’s identify. Source data submitted to BTS are not subject to subpoena, legal discovery, or Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Seadrill Partners, which owns drilling rigs used by offshore contractor Seadrill Ltd., announced on Tuesday that is seeking chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in a Texas court to restructure more than $3 billion in debt. Seadrill Partners said it is entering into the court-supervised process with the approval of a group of key lenders. The filing comes after the London-based company skipped making its periodic swap payments to lenders last week. In the first half of 2020, Seadrill Partners reported that four out of five of its drillships were active. The remaining two working drillships fetched day rates of $188,000 for an undisclosed operator.

Considerable expansion may be caused along the "C" axis by water moving between silica layers of contiguous units (interlayer water absorption). Considerable expansion may be caused along the "C" axis by water moving between silica layers of contiguous units (interlayer water absorption).

Deep Earth Energy Production, or DEEP, says a positive well test from its first geothermal project represents a historic milestone. The Canadian company reports that its Border-5HZ is the deepest horizontal well ever drilled in Saskatchewan and is also the world’s first 90° horizontal fluid production well to be drilled and hydraulically fractured for a geothermal power-generation application. The initial results of the 20-stage stimulation and subsequent modeling “indicate a highly productive well—twice the productivity of an unstimulated well,” the company said in its announcement. DEEP expects that the well will achieve commercial production rates of around 100 liters per second (~26 gal). The field plan is to use six producing wells and four injectors to generate up to 20 MW of power.

To state the obvious, it’s been a turbulent 2020 for the oil and gas industry. We’ve come up against continued weakness in commodity pricing, reductions in capex and opex by virtually all operating companies, and frequent demonization by the popular media. In addition, the outbreak of the coronavirus effectively brought the global economy to its knees. Though it seems grim, I can say with confidence that the industry will overcome these challenges, as it always does. What we do—our critical mission of providing the world with abundant, low-cost energy—is here to stay.