At 14 years old, I took my first flight over stunning Scotland, which sparked a life-long passion for aviation and in 2006 led to me building my own Spitfire aircraft.
Although I fly it to relax, the trips have prompted many theories on the future of oil and gas, which will help everyday engineering.
Aeronautical engineers strive for perfection. They have to design and produce technology which allows aircrafts to fly further and faster, while posing absolute minimal risk of failure. Engineers designing and drilling the world’s longest wells have similar objectives: maximum efficiency with zero failure. Extended reach wells are hugely expensive and require a lot of advanced technology and stringent planning. We need zero failures to get it right.
The easy to access oil we enjoyed 30 years ago has gone. In those days, a drilling rig could drill a simple vertical well in the desert and produce 100,000 barrels per day. This would produce a lot of oil with very little effort.
Extended reach drilling is the innovative technology which will ensure the oil and gas industry survives the next 50 years. Oil will never run out, but easy-access oil will.
Engineers will have to make greater efforts to recover small volumes from more complex reservoirs, which are often harder to access from existing drilling sites. In California, regulators don’t want new platforms being built, as it spoils the natural landscape. To overcome this problem, engineers have to come up with engineering solutions, such as drilling out and away from the existing platform.
Recent extended reach drilling operations have recovered hundreds of millions of barrels of oil which would have been otherwise impossible.
Extended reach drilling operations are difficult and, like flying a plane, handling a high volume of data becomes crucial to a company’s overall success. The consequences of getting the data wrong can be very dramatic. One mistake through lack of understanding can cost companies tens of millions of dollars. Application of the appropriate engineering efforts not only allows operations to deliver ahead of schedule, but provides confidence to take on more difficult projects.
There are huge opportunities for extended reach drilling in the North Sea because of the existing infrastructure. Unfortunately, many companies lack the confidence to drill extended reach wells because of problems in the past. Again, like aviation, we should not be put off by setbacks.
The Wright brothers and other early aviators continually improved their engineering, eventually flying for the first time. We can do this with our drilling engineering. If we continue to push forward we can drill further, longer and deeper, recovering oil that was not originally thought possible.
So the next time you see an aircraft, remember how engineers must look to the sky to solve the problems in the sea.
Iain Hutchison is engineering director of Merlin ERD.
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