Horizontal drilling is one of the critical stages during development drilling where the reservoir footage could be the important key performance indicator. It is utilised by the reservoir management to identify how much footage of the well bore has been steered in the sweet zones. This information will also be used in making decisions for any extension of total depth of a well from the initial plan. Manual computation of the reservoir footage usually consumes a lot of time as the geologist has to first interpret the reservoir depth looking at the log characteristics. This leads to non productive time and sometimes even leads to a pause in the drilling operations until the information is acquired by the reservoir management team in order to call the total depth of the well. In this era, all oil operators are looking to optimise their operations with new technologies and cost effective methods. This initiative was brought up after a survey that takes into account the struggle of geologists to calculate the reservoir footage manually while handling multiple horizontal wells at the same time leading to delays that impact critical decision making of drilling. The paper primarily focuses on presenting an innovative solution that calculates the real-time reservoir footage using a set of real-time calculators and algorithms then compares the results with manual calculation to define the error.
We piloted a case study of this innovation with the LWD logging data such as gamma ray, resistivity, density and input them to a set of processes in the analysis engine and algorithm. The output was displayed in the real-time chart along with other logs that enabled users to make decisions in real-time.
To analyze the results we did a manual calculation by classifying the reservoir based on the log characteristics and compared the results. It showed only a reasonable error that is less than 1%.
