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A time-optimal wellbore trajectory design for slide drilling systems

  • Industrial Application Paper
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Abstract

For decades, the slide drilling system (SDS) has played a critical role in the area of directional drilling. Drilling in the sliding mode is much more time-consuming than drilling in the rotating mode for a SDS. Therefore, it generally takes more time to drill a curved wellbore segment than a straight segment of the same length. Based on this fact, a novel wellbore trajectory design for SDSs is proposed in this paper to reduce the total drilling time and improve economy. The basic idea of our strategy is to replace a long curved wellbore section, e.g., the build-up and drop-off sections, with a series of short circular-arc and straight-line segments in the design stage. Assuming that rotating and sliding modes are only used for straight-line and circular-arc segments, respectively, the total drilling time is reduced by increasing the average rate of penetration. Therefore, the problem lies in how to replace a long circular arc with multiple short circular arcs and straight lines to minimize the total drilling time, which is the aim of this research. In this paper, a piecewise trial strategy is proposed, where the optimized wellbore trajectory is generated by adding circular-arc and straight-line segments with equal length one by one according to the “line first” principle. This strategy converts the original optimization problem, which involves both combinatorial and parameter optimization of unknown dimension, to a much easier one, where there are only three design variables and one set of constraint equations. Due to the multimodal characteristics of the objective function, genetic algorithm (GA) is adopted to obtain the optimal solution. A great reduction of the drilling time is obtained by applying our method to two typical cases, which shows a clear potential for future field applications.

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Funding

This research was financially supported by the National Major Science and Technology Project of China (Grant No. 2016ZX05025-002), National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFC0307100), and the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2015CB251203); their support is highly appreciated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Engineering Mechanics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Xiao-Yu Zhong, Jia-Peng Liu, Kai-Dong Chen, Jia-Qi Chen & Qiu-Hai Lu

  2. Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100090, China

    Xiao-Yu Zhong

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 60201, USA

    Jia-Peng Liu & Chun-Wang He

  4. Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

    Ning-Yu Wang

  5. China National Offshore Oil Corporation Research Institute, Beijing, 100028, China

    Zai-Bin Cheng

  6. MOE Key Laboratory of Petroleum Engineering, China University of Petroleum, Beijing, 102249, China

    Wen-Jun Huang

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  1. Xiao-Yu Zhong
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Correspondence to Jia-Peng Liu.

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The results described in this paper can be replicated by implementing the formulas and MATLAB programs in this paper. The authors would like to share the program code, which can be used for commercial purposes with the consent of the author.

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Zhong, XY., Liu, JP., Chen, KD. et al. A time-optimal wellbore trajectory design for slide drilling systems. Struct Multidisc Optim 63, 881–896 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00158-020-02732-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00158-020-02732-y

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