DOE Selects California Small Business to Help Develop "Smart Drilling System" for Oil and Natural Gas

To boost U.S. oil and gas production by improving the effectiveness of future drilling operations, the Department of Energy has selected a small California-based business to head a team tasked with developing key elements of a future "smart drilling system."

Advanced Composite Products & Technology Inc. (ACPT), Huntington Beach, CA, will design and fabricate an advanced drill pipe made of a carbon fiber-epoxy resin - similar to the material used in golf club shafts. Woven into the composite material will be high-speed data communications capabilities that will convey drilling information from the bottom of the wellbore to operators on the surface.

DOE will pay about $2.16 million of the $2.9-million, three-year research-and-development initiative, with the company funding almost $800,000 and providing equipment valued at approximately $1.5 million.

Composite materials offer the potential of developing lightweight drill pipe that can reduce torque and drag, particularly in difficult drilling environments. This, in turn, can increase drilling speed and lower overall costs -- especially important if the United States is to produce more oil and gas domestically and slow its growing dependence on imported petroleum.

ACPT and its team will develop a 5.5-inch diameter composite drill pipe. Traditionally, composites have been more expensive than steel, however, the company is proposing innovations that it believes can make the advanced drill pipe cost competitive.

Small-diameter (2-inch) composite pipe is available today, but it may not be suitable for some of the more difficult drilling environments likely to be encountered in the future. For example, drilling for deep natural gas deposits or drilling long horizontal wells offshore will probably require larger the diameter pipe to withstand structural stress and pressure.

Integrating data transmission into the drill pipe will be another major advance. By embedding an electrical wire into the composite material, developers hope to provide the capability for rapid data transmission from the bottom of the hole to the surface. (Conventional downhole telemetry systems - for example, those that use pressure pulses sent through the circulating drilling fluids to convey data - are slow and limited in the amount of information that can be transmitted.) A key technical challenge will be to develop reliable electromagnetic connectors that can maintain reliable, high-speed data flow between the sections of drill pipe.

A petroleum consortium comprised of Grant Prideco, leading the development effort, Phillips Petroleum, Texaco, Shell, Chevron, BP/Amoco/ARCO, Mobil, Elf and Aramco will join ACPT in the project. The team will develop a prototype of the system and field test it.

If the development efforts proves successful, the new technology could be in commercial use within the next three years.

The project is an outgrowth of a joint Energy Department-Gas Research Institute study that analyzed the needs and priorities for advanced drilling technology in the nation. The study found that "smart drilling systems," which integrate new drilling hardware advances with improvements in real-time subsurface sensors, could lead to major strides in well-penetration rates, and reduce overall costs of U.S. oil and gas exploration and production.

Drilling new oil and gas wells costs domestic oil producers $10 billion/year, an amount that is likely to climb upward as they encounter more complex geologic formations and increasingly stringent environmental requirements.

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Advanced Composite Products and Technology, Inc.
15602 Chemical Lane
Huntington Beach, CA 92649 - USA

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