DIRECTIONAL DRILLING WITH STOCHASTIC PATH OPTIMIZATION OF OPERATING PARAMETERS

• Main Authors: DYKSTRA, Jason D, XUE, Yuzhen
• Format: Patent
• Language: English; French; German
• Published: 20.10.2021
• Subjects: EARTH DRILLING; EARTH DRILLING, e.g. DEEP DRILLING; FIXED CONSTRUCTIONS; MINING; OBTAINING OIL, GAS, WATER, SOLUBLE OR MELTABLE MATERIALS OR ASLURRY OF MINERALS FROM WELLS

A disclosed drilling method includes: obtaining a formation model representing formation properties to be encountered by a drilling assembly being steered towards a target; identifying at least one path-dependent drilling dynamics model for predicting the drilling assembly's response to one or more operating parameters; characterizing uncertainties associated with said formation model and said at least one drilling dynamics model, said characterizing yielding a probability density function for each uncertainty; representing an acceptable range for each of said one or more operating parameters as a probability density function; employing the probability density functions to determine random samples of said uncertainties and of said one or more operating parameters; applying a cost function to the random samples to determine an expected cost as a function said one or more operating parameters; and displaying the randomly sampled operating parameters having a minimum expected cost as optimized operating parameters.