High-Performance, Water-Based Drilling Fluid Helps Achieve Early Oil with lower Capital Expenditure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Forties field was discovered in 1970 and at its peak produced 500,000 bbl of oil per day (bopd). To re-start major drilling operations using oil-based drilling fluids on some of the field's old platforms would have required significant capital expenditure (CAPEX) to ensure total containment of both the fluid and cuttings. An alternative approach on three of the field's platforms has been successfully employed. The first utilisation in the North Sea of a high-performance, environmentally friendly, water-based drilling fluid has helped the operator achieve early oil with much lower CAPEX. It has also proved possible to drill side-track wells through the Eocene overburden and through the reservoir in one hole section. This was not previously considered possible - historically intermediate casing was set and the reservoir drilled with a smaller hole size. Expensive retrofitting of aging platforms to meet environmental obligations for total containment may be unnecessary when a high-performance, water-based fluid is utilised. This paper describes the characteristics and field performance of this innovative drilling fluid system. Six wells have been drilled from three different platforms during 2004 and early 2005. This paper describes how the fluid performed drilling reactive formations that have only been successfully drilled in the past using oil-based muds. The paper presents a cost model of the alternative approaches to developing Forties using either oil-based muds with total containment or high-performance, water-based fluids with cuttings discharge. This paper will be of interest to Operator's of aging assets looking to continue drilling without heavy CAPEX investment for Total Containment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".