Knowing to "Kill" an offshore well....

DIVERTER PROCEDURE WHILE DRILLING ON A FIXED RIG

Where shallow casing strings or conductor pipe are set, fracture gradients will be low. It may be impossible to close the BOP on a shallow gas kick without breaking down the formation at the shoe. If a shallow gas kick is taken while drilling top hole then the kick should be diverted.

Drilling shallow sand too fast can result in large volumes of gas cut mud in the annulus and cause the well to flow, also fast drilling can load up the annulus increasing the mud density leading to lost circulation and if the level in annulus drops far enough then well may flow.

When drilling top hole a diverter should be installed and it is good practice to leave the diverter installed until 13 3/8" casing has been run.

SHUT-IN PROCEDURE WHILE DRILLING ON A FLOATING RIG

1. Stop drilling

2. Pick drill string off bottom to predetermined shut in point. Stop the mud pump. If flow is excessive begin next step immediately and strip drill string to close in predetermined point once well is secured.

3. Close upper annular and open choke line fail-safe valves.

4. Ensure well is shut in and begin recording shut in pressures.

5. Pass word to the OIL COMPANY REP and DRILLING CONTRACTOR REP of the well condition.

6. Pick up circulating kill assembly if it is to be used.

7. Check space out then close upper pipe rams.

8. Adjust BOP closing pressure as required for stripping and landing drill string on upper pipe rams.

9. Close hang off rams with reduced pressure. Reduce annular pressure.
(Note: there will be pressure trapped between annular and rams)

10. Land drill string on upper pipe rams, adjust BOP closing pressure and down weight on upper pipe rams to prevent the hydraulic effect on the drill string

11. Close wedge locks and adjust compensator to support drillstring weight to BOP plus 20,000 lbs.

12. Bleed off any trapped pressure between the annular and rams.

13. Open annular.

14. Complete recording of shut in pressure build up and pit gain.

15. Decide kill programme. 

SHUT-IN PROCEDURE WHILE TRIPPING ON A FLOATING RIG

1. Set slips below top tool joint.

2. Install full opening safety valve, torque connection and close safety valve.

3. Close upper annular and open choke line fail-safe valves.

4. Ensure well is shut in and begin recording shut in pressures.

5. Pass word to the OIL COMPANY REP and SENIOR DRILLING CONTRACTOR REP of the well condition.

6. Make up the top drive or circulating kill assembly.

7. Open safety valve.

8. Complete recording of shut in pressure build up and pit gain.

9. Decide kill programme.

KILL METHODS - GENERAL

The objective of the various kill methods is to circulate out any invading fluid and circulate a satisfactory weight of kill mud into the well without allowing further fluid into the hole. Ideally this should be done with the minimum of damage to the well.

If this can be done, then once the kill mud has been fully circulated around the well, it is possible to open up the well and restart normal operations.

Generally, a kill mud which just provides hydrostatic balance for formation pressure is circulated.

This allows approximately constant bottom hole pressure which is slightly greater than formation pressure to be maintained as the kill circulation proceeds because of the additional small circulating friction pressure loss.

After circulation, the well is opened up again and the mud weight may be further increased to provide a safety or trip margin.

CONSTANT BOTTOM HOLE PRESSURE KILL METHODS

There are three ‘constant bottom-hole pressure’ kill methods in common use today which are:

• Driller’s Method
• Wait & Weight Method (also known as the ‘Engineer’s Method’)
• Concurrent Method

These three techniques are very similar in principle, and differ only in respect of when kill mud is pumped down.

Shutting a Well

Heavy rain does not mean abundance of water....Singapore

THERE were no sales, just splash at some parts of Orchard Road one morning when a flood turned roads into tea-coloured canals within three hours, from 8am.

It was mid of July 2010, a whopping 101mm of rain - about 60 per cent of what normally falls in the entire month of June - led to flash floods in several other areas too.

The prime shopping belt, Orchard Road, was the worst-hit, but flooding was also reported in Bukit Timah Road, Veerasamy Road in Little India, and Thomson Road.

The flood waters spilled into underground carparks, soiled luxury handbags costing thousands of dollars at the Hermes boutique, and rendered equipment and furnishings at the three-day-old Wendy's restaurant useless.Stores at Lucky Plaza were not spared either, and retailers there said the flooding was the worst they had seen in years.

WHEN the word water appears in print these days, crisis is rarely far behind. Water, it is said, is the new oil: a resource long squandered, now growing expensive and soon to be overwhelmed by insatiable demand. Aquifers are falling, glaciers vanishing, reservoirs drying up and rivers no longer flowing to the sea. Climate change threatens to make the problems worse. Everyone must use less water if famine, pestilence and mass migration are not to sweep the globe.

The language is often overblown, and the remedies sometimes ill conceived, but the basic message is not wrong. Water is indeed scarce in many places, and will grow scarcer. Bringing supply and demand into equilibrium will be painful, and political disputes may increase in number and intensify in their capacity to cause trouble. To carry on with present practices would indeed be to invite disaster.

Why? The difficulties start with the sheer number of people using the stuff. When, 60 years ago, the world’s population was about 2.5 billion, worries about water supply affected relatively few people. Both drought and hunger existed, as they have throughout history, but most people could be fed without irrigated farming. Then the green revolution, in an inspired combination of new crop breeds, fertilisers and water, made possible a huge rise in the population. The number of people on Earth rose to 6 billion in 2000, nearly 7 billion today, and is heading for 9 billion in 2050.

Industry, too, needs water. It takes about 22% of the world’s withdrawals. Domestic activities take the other 8%. Together, the demands of these two categories quadrupled in the second half of the 20th century, growing twice as fast as those of farming, and forecasters see nothing but further increases in demand on all fronts.

Meeting that demand is a different task from meeting the demand for almost any other commodity. One reason is that the supply of water is finite. The world will have no more of it in 2025, or 2050, or when the cows come home, than it has today, or when it lapped at the sides of Noah’s ark. This is because the law of conservation of mass says, broadly, that however you use it, you cannot destroy the stuff. Neither can you readily make it. If some of it seems to come from the skies, that is because it has evaporated from the Earth’s surface, condensed and returned.

Scarce or plentiful, water is above all local. It is heavy—one cubic metre weighs a tonne—so expensive to move. If you are trying to manage it, you must first divide your area of concern into drainage basins. Surface water—mostly rivers, lakes and reservoirs—will not flow from one basin into another without artificial diversion, and usually only with pumping. Within a basin, the water upstream may be useful for irrigation, industrial or domestic use. As it nears the sea, though, the opportunities diminish to the point where it has no uses except to sustain deltas, wetlands and the estuarial ecology, and to carry silt out to sea.

Priced or not, water is certainly valued, and that value depends on the use to which it is harnessed. Water is used not just to grow food but to make every kind of product, from microchips to steel girders. The largest industrial purpose to which it is put is cooling in thermal power generation, but it is also used in drilling for and extracting oil, the making of petroleum products and ethanol, and the production of hydro-electricity. Some of the processes involved, such as hydro power generation, consume little water (after driving the turbines, most is returned to the river), but some, such as the techniques used to extract oil from sands, are big consumers.

Let's remind ourselves, water is precious, one day may come and money might not even buy you the liquid. Let's us continue to use it prudently and educating the public constantly the importance to save as much and not waste, in future, we may need to recycle our own waste product, i.e. urine, and consume the recycled product to survive.

Back to basic ..... "less is good"

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The idea that “less is more” has many adherents in architecture, design and fashion, the technology industry has historically espoused the opposite view. Products should have as many features as possible; and next year’s version should have even more. As prices fall, what starts off as a fancy new feature quickly becomes commonplace—try buying a phone without a camera, a car without electric windows, an SLR without autofocus, auto detect, etc, — product design companies everyday are in the move to add new and more features in an effort to outdo their rivals. Never mind if most of these new features are excess and not being applied or used by consumers. In the product design race and to capture more consumers to the ideas or features, more is always good to have nevermind if need to have.

Are there signs that technologists are waking up to the benefits of minimalism. Consumers are more and more into looking for things to just work, and strong demand from less affluent consumers in the developing world not wanting complicated features and paying more for not using them. It is telling that the market value of Apple, the company most closely associated with simple, elegant high-tech products, recently overtook that of Microsoft, the company with the most notorious case of new-featuritis. True, Apple’s products contain lots of features under the hood, but Steve Jobs has contain with a knack its techno for concealing such complexity using elegant design. Other companies have also prospered by providing easy-to-use products: think of the Nintendo Wii video-games console or the Flip video camera. Gadgets are no longer just for geeks, and if technology is to appeal to a broad audience, simplicity trumps fancy specifications.

Another strand of techno-austerity can be found in software that keeps things simple in order to reduce distractions and ensure that computer-users remain focused and productive. Many word software now have special full-screen modes, so that all unnecessary and distracting menus, palettes and so on are disabled or hidden; rather than fiddling with font sizes or checking e-mail, you are encouraged to get on with your writing. If the temptation to have a quick look at Facebook proves too much, there are programs that will disable access to particular websites at specified times of day; and if that is not draconian enough, there are even some programs that can block internet access altogether. A computer on which some features are not present, or have been deliberately disabled, may in fact be more useful if you are trying to get things done as likely you will feel that the processing speed now works faster than before. There are no distracting hyperlinks on a typewriter.

Frugality is the essence of invention ?

The coming of “frugal” innovation—the new ideas that emerge when trying to reduce the cost of something in order to make it affordable to consumers in places like China, India and Brazil. The resulting products often turn out to have huge appeal in the rich world too, especially in the present era of belt-tightening when all of us in this continent are facing up to the economic crisis. The netbook, or low-cost laptop, was inspired by a scheme to produce cheap laptops for children in poor countries, but has since proved popular with consumers around the world. Tata devised the Nano, the world’s cheapest car, with India’s emerging middle classes in mind; it is now planning to launch it in Europe, too, where there is growing demand for cheap, simple vehicles. Of course, there are pros and cons to such cheap vehicle, safety is one big concern to the users.

All this may offers grounds for hope. If the feature-obsessed technology industry can change its tune, perhaps there is a chance that governments—which have also tended to be inveterate believers in the idea that more is more—might also come to appreciate the merits of minimalism. 

What about today's rig building business, where some rig owners always looking for more drilling features into their rigs and do not mind paying for these extras??   Are they getting their returns higher and faster than those rig operators with basic functional rigs which are also capable of "drilling" the wells with though lower dayrates as compared. Probably these expensive or rich rig owners should start to look at simplicity and the risk of running into well accidents may also be beneficial in the sense "less is safer" !