Coiled Tubing - The Workhorse of Exploration And Drilling Activities

Coiled Tubing - The Workhorse of Exploration And Drilling Activities

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Although petroleum products make life easier, finding, producing, and moving crude oil may have negative effects on the environment. Exploring and drilling for oil may disturb land and marine ecosystems. Seismic techniques used to explore for oil under the ocean floor may harm fish and marine mammals. Drilling an oil well on land often requires clearing an area of vegetation.

How and why coiled tubing has become a workhorse of exploration and drilling activities?

However, technologies that significantly increase the efficiency of exploration and drilling activities also reduce effects on the environment.

For the oil and gas industry, the challenge is to ensure that hydrocarbons are produced, transported, and used cleanly and efficiently.

The upstream sector is in need of new technologies reducing production costs and environmental impact.

Following recent field experiments, Coiled Tubing Drilling (CTD) emerges as one of these promising techniques.

These field trials have demonstrated that CTD can contribute to reduce

Noise levels,

Pollution risks,

Exhaust emission, and

Drilling waste.

Coiled Tubing:

It is a long metal pipe that is surrounded or rolled over a large reel that is brought to the well site when any well repair or workover activities are to be performed.

There are no joints in between the coiled tube which means that it’s a continuous long metal pipe that can be taken inside the borehole to the depth of up to 15000 feet.

Why  Do Oilfield Services Companies Around The World Are Choosing CTD Over Conventional Drilling in Oil and Gas Recovery Worldwide?

Coiled tubing oilfield technology was initially developed for working on live, producing wells.

More recently, this technology has gained wider acceptance among operators for an expanding range of workover and drilling applications and for its ability to reduce overall costs.

The trend toward extended-reach wells favors CT for its capability to drill or to convey tools and equipment in high-angle wellbores.

Coiled tubing optimizes drilling across a wider array of well conditions and is a better option for horizontal wells.

Coiled tubing operations yield higher levels of producibility, performance, well control, and safety, and shorter times to mobilize.

Coiled tubing can help the operator avoid the risk of formation damage inherent in killing a well by allowing continuous circulation during well intervention operations.

The additional advantages, including faster “tripping” time and rig-up/rig downtime, less weight-on-bit, and reductions in personnel and environmental impact associated with fewer cleanup activities.

Proven time and again, these benefits translate to a smaller footprint with higher revenue for the operator, leading more operators to embrace and expand the opportunities for CTD market growth in coming years.

The advantages of CT include existing completion tubular remaining in place, minimizing replacement expense for tubing and components.

And, with coiled-tubing units having increased internet access on location, more real-time data transmission back to the customer’s office during a CT job is now a reality. “In a fracturing operation, many times the operator wants to monitor pressures, rates, and total volumes being pumped in the wells. With this technology, operators no longer have to go to the location to monitor the field operation in real-time.”This way Coiled tubing helps in improving the well & reservoir performance.

There are wide range of operations on the site that makes use of coiled tubing such as:

Milling

Drilling

Rock fracturing

Sidetracking

Production tubing

Low bottom hole pressure drilling

Wellbore cleanout

Nitrogen kickoff

Sand control

Cementing

Mechanical isolation

Tube Logging & perforating

​Coiled tubing has been a key technology in the “hotbeds of activity” for North American unconventional gas production, including shale, tight-gas sand, and coalbed methane wells. Worldwide, coiled-tubing units number more than 1,700, about half in North America. Advancements in the last 10 years in manufacturing, inspection, and quality control methods are among the technologies that continue to help move CT forward. “The CT mills have done an incredible job over the years in making these improvements so the industry is getting what it needs in terms of reliable material characteristics. For more about oil and gas technology, visit Reel Power OG online.