DEVELOPMENT OF OIL WELL MONITORING AND CONTROL SYSTEM

Abstract

Kick is an unplanned and undesirable influx of formation fluid into the borehole which if unattended may develop into a blowout. If the drilling mud hydrostatic head is insufficient to hold the formation fluid, the formation fluid may flow into the wellbore in an unplanned fashion which would result to kick. A kick may escalate into a potentially catastrophic uncontrolled flow of reservoir fluids termed as blowout. If a blowout breaches surface containment, the fluid may ignite to become inferno resulting to loss of life and damage to the oil well facility. With a view to addressing these problems, this research proposed an oil well monitoring and control system that is capable of preventing kick effects such as blowout, sporadic oil spillage and conflagration of inclination. The system comprises of a simulator, data acquisition tool and modules for depth, drilling and flow monitor. There are also modules for kick control and output report. The depth module comprises of five sub-modules, namely: measured depth, true vertical depth, lag depth, total tangible cost of drilling oil well and non-tangible cost of drilling oil well. Drilling module is made up of two sub-modules, namely: rate of penetration, and weight on bit. flow monitor module comprises of two sub-modules, namely: stroke per minute and gallon per minute. Kick control module is made up of three sub-modules, namely: equivalent circulation density, D-Exponent and mechanical specific energy. Output report module is made up of all output generated from all the modules mentioned above. The five modules are integrated and coupled to form the oil well monitoring and control system. The implementation of the proposed system involved the use of Microsoft Access Database Management System and Microsoft Excel as backend engines, Visual Basic.Net served as the frontend while Microsoft Windows Operating System is the operational platform. The simulation of Etim oil well monitoring and controlling operations was carried out using the proposed system. The results from the simulation confirmed the suitability and practicality of the proposed system