Page 11 - Air and gas Drilling Field Guide 3rd Edition

CHAPTER

1
Introduction and Units

Air and gas drilling technology accounts for approximately 30% of the world’s land oil
and gas drilling operations. The technology is limited to use in mature sedimentary
basins. Mature sedimentary basins are older basins that have competent subsurface
rock formations that are cemented and are usually uplifted with little formation water
remaining in them. Although modern air and gas drilling technology began in the
United States in the 1930s, it is presently being used in drilling operations throughout
the world’s many oil and gas producing geologic provinces. It is important at this time
in the development of this technology that the basic principles of the technology be
communicated in a manner that all drilling personnel will understand.
Engineers and drilling supervisory personnel need to make predictive calcula-
tions in order to make their drilling operations efficient and cost-effective. The
prediction calculations for air and gas drilling technology are complicated and
will require the creation of calculation computer programs. There are sophisti-
cated air and gas programs available commercially. However, in the tradition of
most engineering fields, once the basic outline of the program has been deter-
mined, we tend to hand the “care and feeding” of the program over to the com-
puter science department. The authors have chosen to use MathCad™ as our tool
to communicate to the readers the details of how air and gas drilling predictive
calculations are made. These MathCad™ solutions are very transparent and are
written in a sequence that we would do by hand.
The detailed MathCad™ solutions are given in the appendices and the results
are summarized in each applicable text chapter. The solutions are presented in
both USCS units and SI units. It is assumed that newcomers to this technology
will eventually make the choice of whether to use an existing commercial pro-
gram or to develop their own company internal program.

1.1 OBJECTIVES AND TERMINOLOGY
The objective of this professional text is to familiarize the readers with the basic
terminology and operational applications of this new field of air and gas drilling
1