Non-circular wellbores - a new dimension in well construction

Extended Reach Drilling (ERD) wells have delivered added value to the oil and gas industry for many years and the drilling history has shown capability to drill 10 km+ wells. New field development opportunities constrained by stringent environmental legis lation have motivated operators to consider wells beyond 15 km. To reach these targets and to stretch the current limits new knowledge and technology innovation are needed. Both drilling and completion operability design envelope need to be fully understo od to advance technology and to use conventional technologies to its limits. The main objective of this project is to develop fundamental understanding of the behaviour of non-circular wellbores. The goal is to find an optimised wellbore geometry in ord er to extend the capabilities of more efficient well construction and to reach the target of doubling today's drilling reach. In order to obtain this, new key knowledge need to be developed through the project related to non-circular holes on: * Friction - Numerical modeling and laboratory experiments * Hydraulics - Numerical modeling and laboratory experiments * Wellbore stability - The impact of the non-circular geometry on borehole stability * Filtercake build-up - the influence of the geometry on the filtercake build-up * Modell verfication * Modelling the overall system to find the optimum geometries.