Drilling Fluids Consultation System: Development and Field Applications

Abstract Long years of experience in the field and sometimes in the lab are required to develop drilling fluid consultants. Texas A&M University recently has established a new method to develop a drilling expert system that can be used as a training tool for young engineers or as a consultation system in various drilling engineering concepts such as drilling and completion fluids, cementing, completion, and underbalanced drilling practices. Drilling fluids are important factor in drilling and completion operations. Designing drilling fluids depend on formation lithology, temperature and pressure. To the best of the authors knowledge there is no standards developed to aid drilling engineers and scientists to formulate effective drilling fluids systems for the entire well sections. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper is the first study to show a systematic method to design drilling fluids for oil and gas wells. The objective of this paper is to set a module that should aid drilling engineers when designing drilling fluids. A module was created based on several inputs. To create this module, we interviewed experts to gather the information required to determine best practices as a function of different probabilities. We used these best practices to build decision trees that allow the user to take an elementary data set and end up with a decision that honors the best practices.