Novel Well Design Techniques Deliver Step Change Performance in Hard Rock Drilling Operations Onshore Abu Dhabi

Abstract On average, approximately 2.5 days of tool failures occur per well while drilling 6" horizontal hole in hard rock formations in Onshore Abu Dhabi. This represents approximately 5% of an average well duration, which is a significant issue. Not good! To illustrate the size of the prize of eliminating or minimizing to as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP) the directional drilling tool failures: Assuming the onshore team delivers 50 wells per year, the impact equates to 125 lost days due to tool failures alone. 125 days is equivalent to 2.5 wells. Further analysis showed that most of the failures occurred while drilling the dense formation between Thamama H and Habshan-1 and while drilling the Stylolite between R1 and R2 layers. More failures are attributed to the former. The objective of this work is to provide novel general guidelines for efficient drilling of hard rock formations such as Habshan-1 Onshore Abu Dhabi. The paper also highlights the novel application of hard rock drilling techniques Onshore Abu Dhabi that resulted in drilling the longest slim hole hard rock section in one run and successful deployment of the world's longest slim hole lower completion.