Use of the Engineering Simulator for Drilling for Evaluating and Designing Drilling Rigs

ABSTRACT Drilling personnel typically base the selection of a Drilling Contractor and rig on their subjective evaluation of how well various rig components will meet their envisioned drilling needs. This evaluation process involves rating the capabilities of the drawworks, mud and solids control system, mud pumps, tubulars, power generation equipment, and ancillary equipment such as blow-out preventers, choke manifolds, automatic driller, and instrumentation. Consideration must also be given to the type of geology that the planner expects to encounter. However, the true performance or capability of the selected rig is not known until it is contracted and used to drill a well. Many times the advertised capability of the rig is not achieved in the field. An Engineering Simulator for Drilling (ESD) has been developed that can simulate the operation of any SCR type drilling rig in any type of drilling environment. The simulator has been used to compare different equipment for specific drilling programs and has predicted which rig would be the best rig to drill the well. The simulator has also been used to up-grade the design of existing rigs to optimize their performance. This paper presents an overview of the drilling rig simulation algorithms and how they are used to emulate an actual drilling rig. The paper also gives examples of how the simulator is used to evaluate rig capabilities, and how this ability to evaluate rigs, with an unbiased systems approach, can be used by operators to select rigs on a performance basis.