Technology Focus: Offshore Drilling and Completion (April 2008)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Technology Focus I do not yet consider myself an old-timer. However, I remember when I started studying petroleum engineering; our teacher was telling us that drilling was a technology that had not progressed in years, not since its last revolution—the introduction of rotary drilling. The word "revolution" here definitely seems the right one. Since those days, we have seen the introduction of new technologies, such as measurement while drilling, steerable systems, top drives, more-reliable dynamic-positioning systems, dual handling, smart completions, new equipment, new chemicals, new metallurgy, and an exhaustive list of others. These advances enabled success of wells that were increasingly difficult, and we now are drilling horizontally (again, I remember: "It is impossible to drill horizontally, because it is impossible to transmit weight on bit horizontally") and underbalanced, we are drilling high-pressure/high-temperature (and soon very-high-pressure/very-high-temperature) reservoirs and in deep and ultradeep waters, and we are drilling slim or ultraslim wellbores, multilateral and extended-reach wellbores, and combinations of these. Future wellbores will be even more exotic. We complete wells with smart technology or sophisticated multilateral connections, produce gas from tight or ultratight sands, and heat silts in-situ to produce heavy bitumen. Simultaneously, we are making tremendous progress to protect people from incidents and diseases and our environment from unbearable or irreversible damages, especially when using nonaqueous-based mud. Again, this list of recent advances is not complete, but it gives the strong feeling that all of us are engineers dealing with a moving and expanding technology. Actually, it gives me the strong belief that we will overcome new challenges and that, peak oil or not (whenever it may happen), there still is a lot to engineer, a lot to invent, and a lot to progress to move the limits of feasibility in drilling and well engineering further and further. Offshore Drilling and Completion additional reading available at the SPE eLibrary: www.spe.org SPE 105212 • "Deployment of a Riserless Mud-Recovery System Offshore Sakhalin Island" by J.D. Brown, CJSC Elvary Neftegaz, et al. SPE 110359 • "Subsea Slimhole Completions in Deepwater Gulf of Mexico: Case Histories" by J.R. Sanford, Eni Petroleum, et al. Additional reading available at the OTC Library: www.otcnet.org OTC 19077 • "First Jackup Drilling Operation on Grand Banks of Newfoundland—Lessons Learned" by G.C. Bagnell, Rowan Companies OTC 18496 • "2-Million-lbm Slip-Based Landing-String System Pushes the Limit of Deepwater Casing Running" by James N. Brock, Grant Prideco, et al.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.176 | 0.070 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".