How the Drilling Industry Has Become Safer - TOMORROW’S WORLD TODAY®

Many tool and equipment improvements occur “downhole” – below the earth’s surface. As the length and depth of wells have increased significantly, so has the reliability of the equipment used in the wellbore to drill the well. Improving the reliability of downhole motor, bits, and drill string designs significantly reduces the number of “trips” needed to drill a well.

A “trip” is the process of pulling drillpipe from the wellbore or running the pipe back to the bottom of the wellbore. The manual work performed during a trip inherently increases the risk of an injury, and any time the drillpipe is removed from the wellbore, there is an increased risk of a well control event.

Imagine you are a fisherman and you drop your lure to the bottom of the ocean at 200 feet. How much work would it be to reel even a moderately sized fish into the boat? Now imagine that you are on a drilling rig and instead of hundreds of feet, the depth of the hole is over 20,000 feet. And, at approximately every 90 feet of pipe you pulled, you had to disconnect the pipe, move it out of the way, and then pull another 90 feet. As you can imagine, this work can be physically demanding. Fortunately, by using advanced tools and bits in the wellbore, we can reduce the number of trips by 50 percent, reducing the risk of personal safety, oil spills, and emissions.
Read out the full article here: https://www.tomorrowsworldtoday.com/2023/09/18/how-the-drilling-industry-has-become-safer/.
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