Detecting Pressure Anomalies While Drilling Using a Machine Learning Hybrid Approach

Abstract

Abstract Abnormal surface pressure is typically the first indicator of a number of problematic events, including kicks, losses, washouts and stuck pipe. These events account for 60–70% of all drilling-related nonproductive time, so their early and accurate detection has the potential to save the industry billions of dollars. Detecting these events today requires an expert user watching multiple curves, which can be costly, and subject to human errors. The solution presented in this paper is aiming at augmenting traditional models with new machine learning techniques, which enable to detect these events automatically and help the monitoring of the drilling well. Today’s real-time monitoring systems employ complex physical models to estimate surface standpipe pressure while drilling. These require many inputs and are difficult to calibrate. Machine learning is an alternative method to predict pump pressure, but this alone needs significant labelled training data, which is often lacking in the drilling world. The new system combines these approaches: a machine learning framework is used to enable automated learning while the physical models work to compensate any gaps in the training data. The system uses only standard surface measurements, is fully automated, and is continuously retrained while drilling to ensure the most accurate pressure prediction. In addition, a stochastic (Bayesian) machine learning technique is used, which enables not only a prediction of the pressure, but also the uncertainty and confidence of this prediction. Last, the new system includes a data quality control workflow. It discards periods of low data quality for the pressure anomaly detection and enables to have a smarter real-time events analysis. The new system has been tested on historical wells using a new test and validation framework. The framework runs the system automatically on large volumes of both historical and simulated data, to enable cross-referencing the results with observations. In this paper, we show the results of the automated test framework as well as the capabilities of the new system in two specific case studies, one on land and another offshore. Moreover, large scale statistics enlighten the reliability and the efficiency of this new detection workflow. The new system builds on the trend in our industry to better capture and utilize digital data for optimizing drilling.