Minimum gas injection of gas drilling while temperature and pressure coupling

¹ Engineering Technology Institute of PetroChina Xin Jiang Oil Field Company, 834000, Karamay, Xinjiang, China
² Petroleum Engineering College, Yangtze University, 430100, Wuhan, Hubei, China

^* Corresponding author: zhuzhongxi@126.com

Abstract

Gas drilling technology not only has the advantages of avoiding well leakage, shale hydration expansion,reservoir pollution and other issues, but also can greatly improve the drilling speed 4 to 8 times, it is helpful to timely discover and effectively protect reservoir and improve recovery efficiency and single well production of oil and gas reservoir, especially has important significance for hard strata and dense reservoir exploration. However, there are some problems hindered the promotion of this technology, such as gas is hard to carries cuttings and gas hole blocking. One of the key technologies to solve these problems is the determination of gas volume. Most of today’s literature use formation temperature instead of annulus temperature to calculate minimum gas volume. Owing to gas’ PVT effect, temperature is dramatically influenced by pressure flow velocity, there will be big error if we use formation temperature instead of annulus temperature. Meanwhile, most of traditional minimum gas volume methods use top of the drill collar as key point. In this study, we found that on the top of the drill collar, the carrying kinetic energy of gas is not is not necessarily the minimum, and change of the key position is strongly influenced by wellbore structure and make-up of drill tool. Minimum gas volume determined by applying temperature - pressure coupling calculation is more close to site construction, under the given conditions, error of the minimum gas volume is about 0.4%.