Horizontal drilling has been on the rise in recent years with its high productivity. As a result, this method is quickly becoming one of upstream oil and gas industry’s most popular methods for exploring new sites, especially because it allows them to drill more wells at once.
This hdd drilling method has been in use for decades, but it has grown in popularity as a result of continuous modifications and upgrades in the markets where it’s utilized. More and more industries recognize that this drilling technique can be more cost-effective, efficient, and environmentally-friendly than the traditional method of drilling vertical wells.
Horizontal Drilling Is Directional Drilling
Horizontal drilling is a type of directional drilling that is commonly employed to construct wells with inclinations greater than 85 degrees. The procedure entails the placement of a wellbore in a specific location within the reservoir, with the goal of improving overall reservoir performance. This drilling technique can be used to redirect a vertical well to a horizontal course.
Horizontal directional drilling has a wide range of applications. These include the ability to drill under inaccessible surface areas, underground trenchless construction, sidetracking, multiple target zones, fault drilling, relief-well drilling, and salt-dome exploration.
By putting numerous wells in a single place, or well pad, horizontal directional drilling can reduce location costs and environmental effects. It can also intersect many targets in a single well bore, leading to high but cost-effective production rates – this is especially useful near fault planes and salt domes, where multiple production zones are common. But directional drilling does more than just speed up the process in numerous producing zones.
It also simplifies operations in previously unreachable surface sites for vertical drilling. It also improves well drilling around obstacles and beneath rivers.
Given these applications, you may have a clearer understanding of why hdd drilling is gaining traction in the oil and gas business. These applications, like a new area where we have yet to drill a well, are simply scraping the surface. People — and operators — are won over by the advantages of horizontal drilling.
Horizontal Directional Drilling’s Advantages Are Gaining Traction in the Oil and Gas Industry.
The 1980s saw a surge in horizontal directional drilling methods. The Austin Chalk play, which eventually became a key location for horizontal drilling in the United States, prompted people to recognize its benefits.
Right now, oil and gas companies are focusing on expanding their horizons with this increasingly popular reservoir development tool as it provides multiple benefits such as increased production rates from conventional reservoirs while also developing unconventional resources like shale plays that were once inaccessible due to their depth or pressure levels.
Currently, the oil and gas sector benefits from a number of advantages provided by horizontal drills on reservoir development tools such as shale plays, where vertical wells are not viable to drill due to depth requirements or layer thicknesses such as those found in offshore areas.
Reservoirs benefit from horizontal wells for a variety of reasons.
- They have the potential to reduce water and gas coning, as well as any future remedial work.
- They have a lot more surface area in the pay zone, which practically doubles the reservoir production rate.
- They reduce sand production by lowering both pressure drop and fluid velocity around the wellbore.
- They have a more effective drainage pattern, which improves overall oil and gas reserve recovery.
To summarize these benefits in a single phrase, horizontal drilling allows for more efficient oil and natural gas production. As a result, it cuts down on the time and money it would ordinarily take to accomplish this.
For a variety of reasons, horizontal wells offer an advantage over vertical wells.
- They can reduce the number of pumps in a treatment system, ensuring that residual contamination and hot spots are cleaned as little as possible. As a result, they save money on site upkeep.
- Unlike several vertical wells that need additional expenses for trenched conveyance lines, a single horizontal well features an integrated conveyance line that eliminates the need for additional connections..
The length and depth of horizontal wells vary. As a result, several installations are conceivable (e.g., landfills, under buildings, ponds, pipelines, wetlands, roads, runways, and other surface obstructions). Horizontal drilling also improves the efficiency of the treatment and transportation systems. Thus, site operator or owner maintenance is simplified and more cost-effective.
With all of these benefits, it’s easy to see why horizontal drilling is slowly but steadily gaining traction in the business.
The ecology benefits from horizontal drilling as well. For roughly the same amount of oil and natural gas produced as a traditional well, uses less water, it creates fewer air emissions, requires less disposal, and affects less land.
Takeaway
The aforementioned advantages have been bolstered by recent improvements in horizontal drilling. Operators can now produce a significant quantity of reserves from what was earlier thought to be an underperforming region within the reservoir.
As a result, horizontal wells are frequently the most productive in a given field. Thus, despite the fact that horizontal wells are initially more expensive than traditional wells, they are rapidly gaining favor because they produce significantly more beneficial effects in the long term.
