Drilling

The impact of orphan wells, both on the environment and on tightening budgets, is a growing concern in the industry. Boom times result in a vast uptick in wells drilled. In bust times, when companies disappear, the liability outlook for these probes gets murky and federal and state governments start looking for answers.

Extended-reach drilling is becoming more of a mainstream technology as the industry seeks to squeeze difficult reserves and reduce the footprint of projects in fragile environments.

Cube drilling was an exciting idea several years ago. Since then, the luster seems to have faded. Now, production software company Novi Labs says machine learning may bring life back to the concept.

The deal adds 16 super-spec land rigs to Patterson UTI’s domestic fleet and will result in the sale of Pioneer’s well service business.

The authors of this paper propose a new chemical treatment for efficient remediation of water- or hydrocarbon-phase-trapping damage in low-permeability porous media.

Transocean has delayed the delivery of the first two drillships capable of drilling and completing wells requiting 20,000-psi pressure control and told investors they are arriving at a time when the demand for ultrahigh performance is coming back.

The latest success for the ExxonMobil-led consortium is also adding drillships to support a 15-well campaign in the Stabroek Block.

“What is the drilling state” has become an important question among data scientists and automation experts. The simplest definition of a complicated concept is that it is what the driller is doing at the time.

Can a camera on the drill floor, or one on a mobile phone, measure what is going on during drilling or evaluate drill-bit wear more consistently than a human?

When Hess, Halliburton, and Nabors sat down to create a single plan to stream on the driller’s display, they needed to work out a lot of differences, including the definition of the word "activity."