Coring is a critical operation for geologists and petrophysicists to accurately determine the amounts of hydrocarbons in a reservoir. Conventional coring is the acquisition and recovery to surface of a continuous column of reservoir formation material. This important information assists in determining the amount of oil and gas in a rock and the difficulty involved in retrieving the hydrocarbons. Coring requires use of special drillstring with inner and outer barrels. Additionally, the performance metrics for coring are vastly different from drilling. Due to its specialty nature, it is difficult to educate new and inexperienced individuals in coring operational procedures in a classroom environment.
To address the challenge, this oilfield service organization utilized a holistic approach to develop a training course for conventional coring. Content required for the course included product functionality, rig operations procedures, and troubleshooting application challenges. The key deliverable was to meet the growing learning demands from younger generations of employees. The solution was to develop a course which encompassed multi-sensory resources including auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learning. This methodology was necessary to effectively teach a wide range of topics to a diverse population of field personnel. This paper will provide details of the innovative/new learning activities that engaged the learners and facilitated their training.
Conventional coring is the acquisition and recovery of a continuous column of reservoir material from depths of down to 10,000 meters to the surface with the use of purpose built coring bits and barrels. The continuous column of reservoir material, or conventional core, is captured during the creation of the wellbore when drilling through a target formation. The drilling parameters such as weight on bit, revolutions per minute, and mud flow rates, used during conventional coring typically differ compared to standard drilling. This is principally due to the primary objective of obtaining a quality intact sample of the reservoir while coring. Conventional coring has been a principle component of formation evaluation and has been around since the 1920's. As more challenging reservoirs are explored, the ability to understand and produce them has also become more difficult. However, the techniques, equipment, and personnel for coring projects have kept pace and produced increasingly more complex and diverse tools.
