Forecasting supercritical behavior of drill strings in horizontal wells

Abstract

The determining factor in the current changes in the world energy balance and its structure, as well as the global development of the oil and gas industry, is currently the technological factor. As a result, fundamentally new categories of horizontal and inclined wells appeared and developed. They give a multiple increase in flow rates, as they increase the production area many times over. They are used in the development of offshore projects, in swampy and very difficult areas, to increase oil recovery, restoration of inactive wells. New technologies based on the method of horizontal drilling have revolutionized the practice and theory of world oil production, as they have allowed the destruction of offshore oil and gas fields without the construction of expensive offshore foundations and platforms. When drilling horizontal wells, as a rule, the main cause of emergencies is the loss of stability of the drill string, its bifurcation protrusion and the maximum frictional interaction with the well wall. The issues of theoretical modeling of the phenomenon of unstable protrusion of columns are associated with significant difficulties, the main of which is due to the need to set the Sturm-Liouville boundary value problem on a large length of drill string. Because for deep wells, the drill string becomes geometrically similar to a human hair, many traditional mathematical methods used to integrate solving equations become poorly convergent in these cases. Based on the theory of curvilinear flexible rods, the problem of theoretical modeling of supercritical states of drill strings taking into account their contact interaction with the walls of oil and gas wells is set. Analytical solutions of the problem are constructed, which determine the critical values of external tensile or compressive longitudinal force and torque at a given difference in the diameters of the cavity and the drill string, the zones of supercritical states of drill strings are established.