What We Are Solving
It's straight forward.
​
The oil and gas industry is losing time and money due to poor hole-cleaning practices and wellbore instability.
We aim to fix this.
Wellbore Instability: The Main Enemy
Statistics* show that wellbore instability is a major problem costing billions of dollars per year. Even though geomechanics models are designed to prevent it, they can never be more accurate than an educated guess.
The clearest sign of instability is cavings, but too often these are missed because nobody can continually monitor the shakers. Missing this indicator increases the risk of wash out, poor cement jobs, hole collapse, and stuck pipe.
​
*Sources: Transpac, SPE papers
Hole Cleaning
You can have hole cleaning problems without wellbore instability, but you can't have wellbore instability without hole cleaning problems.
​
Cavings in the shakers means the wellbore is enlarged and the hole cleaning models are invalid. Let's face it, hole cleaning is complicated.
​
Typically an engineer has a trusted hydraulics model that might include a cuttings transport model (CTM). Yet except for complex ERD wells, the planning gets condensed into a 'paint by numbers' drilling program. This gets further diluted into 'rules of thumb' for the rig team. The drilling team thinks everything is okay because until now there's been no way to cost effectively measure hole cleaning performance. But we all know there is invisible non-productive time (NPT) happening.
​
The problem is that when both instability and poor hole cleaning occur, there's no single person or team with a complete understanding at the critical moment. Corrective actions only show up during the Lookback meeting, hopefully.
(We have a better idea than what came from this one, we promise.)
