Technological advances in the oil drilling industry in the last decade have reduced the surface impact of oil and gas operations. Improvements in drilling, including directional and horizontal drilling have been the main focus. These enhancements have resulted in better recovery of hydrocarbon reserves.
Yet none of this would be possible without the ingenuity applied to the task of drilling for oil which had its origins in the early 1800s. Not to mention the huge strides forward made particularly in the 150 years or so that followed.
Join us for a potted history of oil drilling that brings us to the present day. We’ve also touched on what lies ahead in the innovative world of well drilling equipment.
Salty Beginnings
Humans have been boring beneath the earth for thousands of years. It was while drilling brine wells using the spring pole method that oil was discovered. In 1802 it took the Ruffner brothers 18 months to drill through 40 feet of bedrock to a depth of 58 feet using a spring pole.
This was slow going compared to J C Rathbone’s cable tool drilling and wooden derricks with the help of a steam engine. It managed to drill an oil well to a depth of 140 feet and yielded 100 barrels of oil a day.
1882 saw the invention of rotary drilling with the use of water pumped by a windmill. A steam-driven rotary drilling rig with a double-pronged fishtail bit caused the famous nine-day gusher at Spindletop in 1901. This marked the beginning of the first Texas oil boom. The rotary drill and rig at Spindletop used a mixture of water and clay called drilling mud, discovered the year before.
The record depth recorded for a cable-tool rig is 11,145 feet. By contrast, after ten years of drilling, a rotary rig reached more than 40,000 feet on the Kola Peninsula in Russia.
The Best Bits For Oil Drilling
Rotary drilling became well established as the best technique of the day. The next breakthrough was the invention in 1909 by Howard Hughes Sr. of the twin-cone roller bit. In 1933, two engineers at Hughes’s tooling company invented the tricone bit which drilled holes straighter and faster.
Since then, the rotary principle has been the most frequently employed in oil drilling. This is evident even with the modern engineering and sophisticated tooling featured on kor-pak.com.
Hydraulic fracturing together with horizontal directional drilling now gets to previously inaccessible reserves. This new technology means that current and future demand for oil can probably be met.
Dry sonic drills are proving advantageous in some sites and typically experience only 1% borehole deviation. That’s one-tenth of the potential deviation of traditional rotary drill strings.
As a booming industry, oil and gas (O&G) currently has a global daily supply requirement of over 99 million barrels of crude. Demand for fossil fuels is forecast to increase by roughly 25% in the next 22 years
O&G Has AI Too
The Oil and gas industry (O&G) is benefiting enormously from automation and digital transformation. AI improves reliability and optimizes operations. It has the potential to generate serious profit.
Robotic drilling systems (RDSs) are among the most exciting tech advances. They enable a fully unmanned drill floor for both land and offshore operations. RDSs can handle pipes and tools and replace casing crews and tongs.
They have also proven they can handle machines with spinning operations. State-of-the-art oil field drilling technology now includes automated drill rigs. They are self-movable and go from one well location to the next.
Autonomously operated in-pipe inspection robots (IPIRs) detect cracks, corrosion, and major defects in pipes that halt production as a result of pipe failure. IPIRs transmit data and control signals via wireless sensor networks (WSNs).
Designed to send information to a single base station, WSNs monitor pipeline integrity. They also detect sand build-up, pipe damage, vandalism or theft, and fluid leakage.
It is now common for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to inspect tanks, pipelines, and refineries. Also known as drones, they are often operated from a ground control station.
UAVs combine robust flight control techniques, inertial navigation, data fusion, and tracking control. Drones equipped with thermal and optical cameras explore O&G reservoirs in extreme environments.
4D seismic data acquisition and enhanced computing power enable companies in O&G to capture subsurface geology and identify fossil fuel deposits with greater accuracy than before.
Forward to the Future
Oil drilling in the oil and gas industry is very technology-dependent. Demand and international competition will continue to motivate innovation. The result is the faster completion of drilling operations and ever-increasing oil and gas production. This is definitely an industry where engineering and tech will continue to forge ties into the future.
