Abstract
Gartner named digital twin as one of the top ten technology trends for 2019. The awareness of this trend has now also reached the E&P industry, which can be seen by an increasing number of papers being published about the subject the last two years. Even though the term is new, the technology behind has been around for many years. In this paper we will show how a digital twin araised through the development of the comprehensive model. A model that has evolved through the development of smaller simulation models, each made to solve a different problem. With only minor extension, this model represented a complete virtual rig, ready to connect and develop the managed pressure drilling (MPD) control system. Running together with the control system it was also, with some minor changes, ready to be used in a training simulator. The big step was to prepare the model for running in parallel with a real well to estimate downhole pressure and other variables where they were not measured. Various issues around this are discussed in the paper. Finally, some results from a full-scale test of an MPD system on a rig at a research and development facility in Navasota, Texas, are presented. These tests showed that after some tuning the model could assist the control system in maintaining the pressure at any given arbitrary point in the well, an important point toward making a fully integrated MPD system.
