DEPARTMENTS • DRILLING & COMPLETION NEWS
Equinor and partners take
$9 billion decision to invest
in Brazil's BM-C-33 project
A second highly deviated deep well has been spudded as part of Utah FORGE's
continued efforts to commercially scale Enhanced Geothermal Systems tech-
nologies. Temperature at total depth is expected to reach 440°F.

Utah FORGE spuds 2nd highly deviated deep well
The Utah Frontier Observatory for
Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE),
funded by the US Department of Energy,
recently commenced the drilling of its
second highly deviated deep well . This
second well will serve as the produc-
tion well of a two-well doublet and will
mirror the existing injection well, which
was drilled between October 2020 and
February 2021. The new well will be
located approximately 300 ft from the
injection well.

Like the injection well, the upper part
of this well will be drilled vertically
through approximately 4,550 ft of sedi-
ments, at which point it will penetrate
into hard crystalline granite. At about
5,600 ft, the well will be gradually steered
at 5°/100 ft until it reaches an inclination
of 65° . The total length of the well will
be approximately 10,700 ft, with the toe
reaching a vertical depth of 8,265 ft. The
temperature at this depth will be 440°F.

“This is a crucial next step in the Utah
FORGE project’s goal of de-risking the
tools and technologies required for mak-
ing Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS)
technologies commercially viable," said
Joseph Moore, Principal Investigator of
Utah FORGE. “ In the future, water will
be pumped into the injection well, travel
through the reservoir of tiny fractures
that we previously opened, absorb the
heat from the hard, hot crystalline gran-
ite, and then be pumped up through this
new production well to the surface ."
Once the well is completed, tests
will be run to continue facilitating the
development of the EGS reservoir and its
long-term connectivity. Additional tests
will also include determining the stress
conditions through short-term injection
experiments, during which microseis-
micity will be monitored.

BSEE tests subsea blowout preparedness with GOM drills
The US Bureau of Safety and
Environmental Enforcement (BSEE)
completed two unannounced drills in
May to evaluate the industry's prepared-
ness to respond to a subsea blowout.

Each drill lasted between three and five
days .

During the two drills, with Beacon
Offshore Energy and Chevron, each
company was required to deploy a cap-
ping stack from their respective storage
locations to separate areas in the Gulf of
8 Mexico . Once onsite, each operator low-
ered a capping stack onto a simulated
well head on the ocean floor in about
6,000 ft of water, connected the capping
stack to the wellhead, and pressurized
the system to 12,500 lb/sq in to simulate
well pressure.

BSEE said initial observations indi-
cate the drills met requirements for
deploying source control equipment but
will i ssue a formal report later this year
with a full evaluation .

Equinor , Repsol Sinopec Brasil and
Petrobras have taken the approximately
$9 billion investment decision to develop
the BM-C-33 project in Brazil.

Located in the Campos Basin, BM-C-33
comprises three pre-salt discoveries –
Pão de Açúcar, Gávea and Seat – contain-
ing natural gas and oil/condensate recov-
erable reserves surpassing 1 billion BOE.

The concept selected for BM-C-33 is
based on a floating production, storage
and offloating unit (FPSO) capable of pro-
cessing gas and oil/condensate and spec-
ifying these resources for sale without
a need for further onshore processing,
a first in the country. FPSO production
capacity will be 16 million cu m/day of gas ,
with startup planned for 2028.

The FPSO will be Equinor’s second in
Brazil using combined cycle gas turbines,
significantly reducing carbon emissions
during operations. The technology, which
will also be applied in Bacalhau in the
Santos Basin, combines a gas turbine with
a steam turbine to take advantage of the
excess heat that would otherwise be lost.

By implementing this technology, the
average CO 2 intensity of BM-C-33 over its
lifetime will be lower than 6 kg/BOE.

BM-C-33 is one of Brazil's main projects
to develop new supplies of domestic gas .

It's expected that gas exported from the
project could represent 15% of the total
Brazilian gas demand at startup. Its devel-
opment will also contribute to the coun-
try's economic development .

Neptune boosts production
from Adorf field in Germany
Neptune Energy announced first pro-
duction from its operated Adorf Z17 gas
well in the municipality of Georgsdorf
in northwestern Germany. The well is
expected to increase Neptune’s production
from the Adorf licence to around 6,300
BOED. Construction of a dedicated processing
plant at the site for treatment of the gas
was also completed earlier this year.

Drilling of another well, Adorf Z18,
reached a final depth of 4,773 m in April
and is due to begin production in Q3.

J U LY/AU G U ST 2023 • D R I L L I N G C O N T R AC T O R




DRILLING & COMPLETION TECH DIGEST • DEPARTMENTS
Transocean Encourage drills its first fully automated hole section
The Transocean Encourage recently
drilled its first fully automated hole sec-
tions while working for Equinor in Norway.

Transocean, Equinor and HMH worked
together to complete the autonomous oper-
ation at the Heidrun field in April.

The goal was to automate routine opera-
tions, reducing the potential for human
errors and driving efficiency. “Thus, giv-
ing the drillers more time to focus on
what really matters, like well construction
challenges and red zone management,”
said Francesco Ferri, Operations Manager,
Europe & Mediterranean for Transocean.

To enable this operation, the semi-
submersible was equipped with several
“smart modules” that are designed to:
■ Establish well protection parameters,
which are set either manually by the user
(static mode) or detected by the digital
twin of the well (dynamic mode);
■ Optimize torque adjustments to improve
the rate of penetration (ROP) and reduce
wear and tear on the bottomhole assembly
(BHA) and drill bit;
■ Optimize weight on bit (WOB), achieved
in combination with the use of an active
heave compensator to minimize the
weight variations;
■ Improve human-machine interface to
better visualize the main drilling param-
eters and easily control the equipment on
the rig floor;
■ Facilitate automatic tripping in and out
of hole. This allows a reduction in the
number of buttons to be clicked, from 18
with two operators down to just three
confirmations from one operator. Tripping
speed is optimized automatically to meet
the values of surge and swab simulated in
real time; and
■ Provide for automatic drilling connec-
tion sequences, including “off-bottom”
activities like connections and pipe han-
dling, as well as tagging bottom and auto-
drilling. The hole sections were drilled by
designing automatic sequences for trip-
ping and drilling and for making up drill-
ing connections. Automatic controls on
torque and WOB optimized the ROP and
increased the operating window .

“The focus is not only on performance
and consistency but, most importantly,
The Transocean Encourage recently deployed a new drilling assistance module,
working in concert with other smart modules on the rig, to drill a fully automated
hole section on a well at the Heidrun fi eld in Norway.

on incident prevention, through automatic
protections that allow improved response
time to critical conditions, e.g., hookload
protection, pack-off protection, flow limi-
tations, etc,” Mr Ferri said.

“Such protections are enhanced by
real-time simulations of characteristic
parameters of the well to automatically
adapt the ongoing operations, for exam-
ple, optimized tripping speed accounting
for continuous surge and swab simula-
tions, or automatic mud pump startup
sequences.” Finally, he added, the integration of
downhole real-time data collection and
topside automation allows a “closed-loop”
system to move from automatic to autono-
mous. Data analytics to enable
further fine tuning
On Cat D rigs like the Transocean
Encourage, which are specialized for the
harsh environments of offshore Norway,
work on automatic drilling technologies
has been in progress since summer 2017,
Mr Ferri said, with the goal of moving por-
tions of the drilling process from automa-
tion toward autonomous operations.

In April this year, the Transocean
Encourage tested for the first time the
use of a new drilling assistance module
in combination with the relevant smart
modules. The ongoing operation was drill-
ing the 16-in. and 12 ¼ -in. hole sections on
the F-4 well at the Heidrun field operated
by Equinor.

The rig team executed a total of 51 con-
nections with a median slip-to-slip (S2S)
time of 3.14 min, all without intervention
from the driller. The best S2S time was 2.88
min, while the best weight-to-weight time
was 4.16 min.

Even though the Transocean Encourage
was the first rig to demonstrate the per-
formance of the smart modules working
together, the results from this first deploy-
ment were already competitive with
results achieved manually, Mr Ferri said.

“Further fine-tuning will be implemented
through the learnings extrapolated with
data analytics,” he added.

The Transocean Encourage is on an
eight-year contract with Equinor that had
been set to expire in December. In March,
Equinor extended the rig’s contract for
nine additional wells.

On other rigs in its fleet, Transocean
has been working to deploy an automation
solution from InteliWell. The independent
joint venture, in which Transocean has
partial ownership, offers similar automa-
tion functionality, Mr Ferri said, and initial
results have been promising.

D R I L L I N G C O N T R AC T O R • J U LY/AU G U ST 2023
9