Dynamic Error Analysis of Measurement While Drilling Using Variable Geomagnetic In-Field Referencing

Abstract

Summary The safe and economical determination of a wellbore trajectory in directional drilling is traditionally achieved by measurement-while-drilling (MWD) methods, which implement magnetic north-seeking sensor packages. Inaccuracies in the determination of well path arise because of random and systematic errors in the measurements of the sensors. Multistation analysis (MSA) and magnetic in-field referencing (IFR) have already demonstrated the potential to decrease the effects of errors because of magnetization of drillstring components along with variable errors caused by irregularities in the magnetization of crustal rocks in the vicinity of wells. Advanced MSA methodologies divide a borehole into several sections and use the average reference values of the total magnetic field, declination, and dip angle for analysis of errors in each section. Our investigations indicate that the variable-reference MSA (VR-MSA) can lead to a better determination of errors, specifically in areas of high magnetization. In this methodology, magnetic reference values are estimated at each station using forward and inverse modeling of surface-magnetic observations from IFR surveys. The fixed errors in magnetometer components are then calculated by minimizing the variance of the difference between the measured and unique estimated reference values at each station. A Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm (LMA) is adopted to solve the nonlinear optimization problem. Examination of this methodology using MWD data confirms more than 20% improvement in well-path-determination accuracy by comparing the results with the corrected path from the conventional MSA method and gyro surveys.