Overcoming Geological and Geomechanical Challenges for Drilling High Angle Well in Deep Offshore Gulf of Mexico: Example from Buckskin

Abstract

Abstract The Gulf of Mexico, and more precisely the Wilcox trend, has long been considered as challenging area for developing profitable hydrocarbon fields. In fact, the safe drilling of deep offshore wells needs to take into account the geological and geomechanical complexities, generated by the different sedimentological and tectonic events that accompanied the development of the Wilcox trend. In the case of Buckskin field, located in Keathley Canyon protraction (Figure 1), and in order to overcome those challenges, we developed a workflow that ranks all the parameters related to the geometry, the geology, the rock quality and the geomechanics characteristics of the reservoir. The core of the workflow is articulated around a probabilistic method that will assess the uncertainty of the productivity index, based on experimental design and Monte Carlo simulation. The proposed workflow allowed the optimization of the PI of the well thanks to a highly deviated reservoir section at a depth below 24,000’, combined with an optimal fracking job.Figure 1Location of Buckskin field After a brief introduction of the general context of the Buckskin field, we will review the notion of the PI, then we will review the adopted process prior to the geological and geomechanical processes for modeling the rock properties and stresses and their corresponding uncertainties. The selected design of experiment approach will then be described then we will discuss the outcome.