Deepwater Well Control Automated Shut-In Method and Simulation System

With the current trend of low product quality of oil and gas resources becoming more and more obvious, deepwater and ultra-deepwater oil and gas have become an important field of oil and gas development in various countries. Deepwater oil and gas reservoirs are characterised by complex geological conditions and a narrow window of safe density, leading to the frequent occurrence of such complications as downhole kicks and overflows, which seriously threaten the lives of engineers and pollute the environment. The prerequisite for dealing with kick is to shut-in, but currently the drilling site shut-in relies on manual operation by multiple engineers, which not only takes a long time to operate, but is also affected by the subjective factors of the engineers. With the maturity of automation and artificial intelligence theory, well control shut-in also needs to develop in the direction of automation and intelligence, and carry out the research of well control automation shut-in system, so that the well can be shut-in quickly, automatically and efficiently when the drilling site kicks, blowouts and other complex situations. In this paper, using statistics and machine vision algorithms, an intelligent identification method of shut-in equipment operation status is established, and at the same time, a well control automated shut-in simulation system is designed based on PLC, and automated shut-in tests are carried out. The results show that the method of intelligent identification of operating status of shut-in equipment can identify the choke opening, the closure of each blowout preventer, and the working status of mud pump and top drive system in real-time without modifying the original equipment, and meanwhile, the well control automated shut-in simulation system can complete the shut-in within 5 min. This shows that the deepwater drilling well control automated shut-in method and simulation system can replace the engineer's operation to a certain extent, which provides a guarantee for the safety of deepwater and ultra-deepwater oil and gas drilling.