Offshore staff
STRAUME, Norway – Enhanced Drilling will equip drillships for Woodside Energy’s Sangomar field development offshore Senegal with the EC-Drill controlled mud level (CML) system.
This is a CML type managed pressure drilling (MPD) technique that manipulates and controls the mud level in the riser to change bottomhole pressure.
Some of Sangomar’s development wells will need the technology because of their downhole pressure regimes.
Woodside has previously deployed Enhanced Drilling’s riserless mud recovery (RMR) system, including in the Browse basin in 2009, the first application of RMR from a jackup offshore Australia.
The company then used RMR two years later for the Tidepole East-1 exploratory well off Western Australia, completing a total section depth of 1,905 m (6,250 ft).
Enhanced Drilling has just completed the first of four wells for an unnamed major operator in the US Gulf of Mexico using EC-Drill, in order to navigate the narrow bottomhole pressure windows for drilling and completion operations.
The following tasks were conducted:
- Drilling two hole sections using a constant bottomhole pressure version of MPD, including tripping, pumping out of hole, reaming, flow checks
- Managed pressure cementing, including associated MPD operations (casing running, casing circulation)
- What the company claims was the world’s first horizontal managed pressure gravel packing operation with a CML system, including associated managed pressure completion operations (tripping, circulating mud to brine, and flow checks).
09/24/2020
