Advanced Snake Drill Technique: Method for improving of oil extraction
percentage
B Sreeranga Pradyumna, Ankur Dwivedi, G Sai Akhil
Btech Applied Engineering in specialization in Upstream
University of Petroleum and energy Studies, Dehradun
Abstract:
Oil and gas is one of the prime drivers of the worlds
economy. The resources of Oil and gas are plenty enough
around the world with 70% of the resources turning out to
be unconventional. Economically extracting these
resources is always a challenge for the engineers.
Different types of drilling techniques like horizontal drilling
technique, multilateral drilling technique, etc. are
proposed and implemented depending on the type of
reservoirs. When the crude oil is trapped in different
geological features situated moderately near each other,
drilling more than one well in the same place or in the
nearby places to extract the oil trapped from different
reservoir pockets is very uneconomical. The snake well
drill is operated from a single drilling platform to reach
number of different reservoir pockets using the state of art
software that allows the snake well drill to follow certain
complex horizontal paths that cut through shale and sand.
They use mobile drilling units that can be moved between
the well pads. This prevents dismantling and
reassembling drilling equipment at each of the pad
making the process faster and saving resources. And also
its snake like structure helps in achieving maximum
reservoir drainage. Though being an improvised
technique of extracting the distributed oil profitably, it
sometimes fails in some areas. The snake well drill can
accidentally miss the target location of oil bearing sands
and can drill water bearing sand leading to less recovery
of oil. Secondly, there a chance of early water and gas
breakthrough at the heel of the well would decrease the
recovery. In this paper attempt has been made to propose
some techniques to improve the of the Snake well drilling
technique and reduce the risk of failure.
Keywords: snake well drilling; shale; crude oil; well pads;
reservoir drainage
Introduction:
Exploration and production of hydrocarbons is a high risk
venture. Geological concepts are uncertain with respect
to structure, reservoir seal and hydrocarbon charge.
Uncertainties lies even with the cost related to production
of oil, oil cost in market and expectations are high of
producing oil which is economically viable. In most of
the times, conventional drilling is applied for favorable
extraction of oil but still two-third of total remains left when
end of normal production life of an oil field is declared and
even sometimes conventional drilling technique are not
preferred and other techniques are approached.
Advancements in technology and techniques allowed
exploration in new frontier zones, hard to reach places
and some to ultra-deep water. The new techniques
proposed are approved after risk analysis and production
strategies to minimize the uncertainties.
One of those technique trending is snake drill technique
of which practice is increasing with time as it ensures
better production than conventional drilling in most of the
oil fields not having normal conditions and a new
possibility for extended reach drilling. But the uncertainty
and some points of failure still lies and so improvements
and methods are being introduced with time.
This paper covers a brief review of the present snake drill
technique, the need to adopt this technique with the
software or the tools which helped it lead to make higher
production at possible minimum cost and uncertainty. It
too provides an overview of the champion west oilfield and
the role of this technique to make it a success. Being a
new trending technique some alternate method or
solutions are proposed to the flaws of this technique at
present time.
Type of Drilling Techniques:
Vertical Drilling:
It is the conventional technique of drilling a well to drill
hydrocarbons vertically below the access point. It is the
first and foremost method proposed and used for drilling
Oil wells. These wells are less expensive as they do not
require any directional tools and also give less
productivity due to its less range. Hydraulic fracking
method is used to improve the production of these wells.
Figure 1: Conventional Vertical Drilling
2 SPE PDPU Fest 2016
Horizontal Drilling:
Horizontal drilling was started in 1929 and became a
common and prominent process by 1980s.The process of
drilling in which the well is turned horizontally at a certain
Figure 2: Horizontal Drilling
depth after the conventional drilling process is called
horizontal drilling. It takes a J shape. The point at which
the vertical well deviates from its path at certain inclination
to make it horizontal is called kick off point.
The drilling of a horizontal well is much more
complicated than drilling a vertical well. The driller has to
calculate the approximate location above the point at
which the drill must turn as that the existing drill assembly
is removed and a special bit is installed for horizontal
drilling.
Directional Drilling:
The process of controlling the direction of wellbore to
guide it to a predetermined underground location baring
oil is call directional drilling. Snake wells comes under the
process of directional drilling. This is done using
complicated tools, machinery and BHA. The paper further
tells how it is done and more information about it.
Figure 3: Directional Drilling (Snake Drilling)
History and Development:
The snake well drill technique is first implemented in the
champion west field offshore Brunei. This field was first
discovered by the British Malayan Company which is now
called as Brunei Shell Petroleum (BSP) which gave the
term snake wells referring to the series of the wells
(precisely 16 and 13 side-tracks) drilled over there. The
first Field Development Plan was written in the year 1991
and in the end of 1990s and around 1997, shell started to
make use of the development of new technologies in
communication for data transmission and soundings for
measuring and control automation for making decisions.
And also improvement in technology is reservoir imaging,
which is to see what is happening underground and much
more accurate drilling methods.
In the start of the Drilling of the field it was very tough,
complicated and expensive. Only 3 out of 5 planned drills
were able to complete in the Phase 1 which led to
postpone and reschedule the next subsequent phases. In
the year 2000 the early oil campaign added 5 x 10 6 m3 of
new oil reserves with daily average production of 2.5 to
3.0 x 103 m3 oil and 2 x 106 mln m3. A full review of
Champion west field was carried out in the month of
September 2000. And in the year 2002 there was call for
another field development plan for 6 oil and 2 gas wells
were planned in the year 2003/4. In the phase 2
developments it includes the surface top deck extension
to well jackets, piling new 36 and 30 conductors for
single and splitter wellheads, installation of Containerized
Electrical Room (CER), installation subsea power cable.
This Phase 2 campaign took place in 2003 and 2004.
Need for Snake Wells:
The concept of snake well is first given by Shell oil and
first formulated in Rasau and later in Brunei. These well
drilled along horizontal direction using extended reach
drilling moving in a pattern comparable to a sinusoidal
wave moving through multiple layers of shale within
reservoirs. This concept have enabled fields once
dormant to be produced economically. These wells tap
into small and thin reservoirs while at the same time
allowing the measurement and flow of separate sections.
They are designed in such a manner to improve rate of
production with continuous monitoring and controlling of
each section with the smart completion methods. Due to
its length, it is able to achieve maximum reservoir
drainage and able to reach uneven horizontal surfaces. It
terminate the need of multiple factors essential in the
conventional method for various geological structures
during drilling.
3 SPE PDPU Fest 2016

Along with the points mentioned above the design of

snake well have following advantages:

Its production efficiency is equal to the efficiency

of 4-5 conventional well
They do not require wellbore access for well
management
Their design drain multiple vertically stacked
dipping reservoirs helps to form a common
Figure 4: Components of BHA
drainage pattern

With smart completion method, its design shows some

unexpected benefits like minimizing subsurface
uncertainties and cleaning up of well.
Working Of Snake Wells:
Snake wells is the terms used to represent the series of
the horizontal wells which have been drilled in the
Champion West field due to their peculiar structure in
contrast to conventional Vertical drilling. In the other
words it is the practice of directional drilling which means
the drilling of Non vertical wells. This ground breaking
piece of technology is very much useful in reaching the
specific pockets of oil and gas traps or more precisely
targets which are placed in the regions which are
conventionally not reachable, environmentally sensitive
areas where rig cannot be setup due to its ability to drill
sideways.
These non-vertical wells are drilled by
simply pointing the drill in the required direction. There is
a downhole steerable mud motor to which the drill bit is
attached and there is bending near the bit and this bend
steers the bit in different from wellbore axis. This mud
motor turns only the bit instead of the complete length of
drill pipe. When the required angle is achieved the drill
string including the bend are rotated ensuring there is no
other sideway drilling from wellbore axis. A probe full of
instruments are placed in the drill pipe above the mud
motor which enables the driller on the surface to get to
know which direction and the what is the inclination he is
heading. The probe that is being used is called MWD
which means Measuring While Drilling. There are various
logging sensors available which help in this geo steering.
Most of the horizontal wells which are being drilled
are based upon the reservoir and geological parameters
and here we use the same parameters like in the regions
with more porosity leads to higher ROP and any change
in this ROP helps us to know that there is porosity change
and so the well path is steered to maintain the high ROP
or simply keeping the well path within the high porosity
region. There are often many other logging tools that help
us to sort out the horizontal drilling. Gamma Ray MWD
tools are used to pick up the top of the reservoir. This is
used while drilling the horizontal to provide assistance in
lithological interpretations of layered or thin reservoirs.
Champion West Oil Field Overview:
Brunei Shell Petroleum has 7 offshore oil fields in which
one of them is Champion Field. The countrys production
of the oil reached a peak of 250,000 b/d and fell to
150,000 b/d in the nineteen eighties. Again it rose to
162,000 b/d and then to 180,000 b/d in 1992 and then
falling to 174,000 b/d in the year 1993. On this same rate
of extraction the countrys oil reserves wouldnt last for
more than 27 years time. The Champion west Oil Field
which was discovered in the 1975 got the name in the
year 1990. There are more than 1000 reservoirs in the
champion west area. The geological location of the field
is located in the north of the Brunei Offshore sector
approximately 90km from Seria and some 10 km
northeast of Iron Duke Field where the water depth is
almost about 40 to 47 meters
4 SPE PDPU Fest 2016
. The main difficulty with these kinds of wells lies in their
Figure 5: Location of Champion West Field
The champion west field consists of about 1200m vertical
reservoir sequence over a complete area of 10km 2 in 15
main blocks. The hydrocarbons have been found over a
wide stratigraphic range which consists of number of
distinct columns of thick shale along with accumulation of
thin shales. This formation sequence then continues into
gas prone as the depth increases. This gas is either
present as either associated or non-associated gas. The
column length of oil varies from 22 to 400 meters.
The field development was divided
in to different phases. The phase 1 and phase 2
developments are discussed in the history and
development where the initial phase was tough to start
with and also expensive. In the later phase there was
installation of Containerized electrical room, single and
splitter wellheads and in this phase 6 oil and 2 gas wells
were planned to drill.
In the Phase 3 development, there
are 20 wells including of both oil and gas. In this phase
there is implementation of ERD wells in which they are
designed as snake wells which penetrate into the
reservoir several times. They found that, due to the
complex nature of vertically stacked and structurally
dipping reservoirs there is a very need for a well design
which is different from the standard design. The vertical
drilling method was already ruled out, multilateral drilling
concept was also not considered taking into the account
of cost and complexity, conventional horizontal drilling
concept was not attractive because there would be need
for more number of wells required for reservoir drainage.
So the ultimate design required to rule out all the
complications is to drill in shape of snake horizontal wells
with Smart Completions
Phase 3 of Champion West is actually split
into three sub-phases - the 3a, initiated in 2004, involves
drilling five development wells from a newly installed
platform using Smedvigs tender assist rig West Pelaut.
The wells have shown excellent initial flow rates with the
start-up producer flowing at almost 17,000 b/d, or 2,650
cu m/d. This eclipses BSPs record for a single well of
1,750 cu m/d achieved from Champion well. Henderson
attributes CW-29s high reservoir deliverability to its snake
trajectory and optimized completion design. Champion
West completion has two zones, each controlled by
variable interval control valves (ICVs) to balance the
offtake from either zone. Each zone has two pressure
gauges associated with it on either side of its valve - one
to measure reservoir pressure, and one to measure
pressure inside the completion.
Smart Completions:
completion which means making the well to produce the
oil. To achieve the completion, dogleg severity needs to
be controlled and directional tools are required. According
to the Project leader Grahaeme Henderson the snake
wells had given positive end results with low unit
development costs, high initial flow rates and also that
recovery efficiency has been proved to be significantly
better than many cases of vertical wells.
To obtain a perfect or optimized completion
the completions must be smart which imply the usage of
Flow control valves, Pressure gauges, fiber optic
temperature sensors which will be operated remotely. By
this design the will be no need for well bore access for
well or reservoir management and for its maintenance.
This platform provides remote access to BSPs operation
center in Seria via high band width connections to the
shore which helps in conducting the real time monitoring,
clean up and optimization of wells. Also helps in online
testing of the well using multiphase flow meter and Rapid
shut down and start up whenever required. It also allows
production testing of individual zones without
interventions and with minimal production interruption.
The well is also equipped with a fibre-optic distributed
temperature sensor to monitor its clean-up and in-flow
behaviors, and to detect early signs of gas and/or water
breakthrough in the future. There is also a room for
increasing the economic life span of the wells.
Initially used in subsea wells, where
intervention is expensive and high-risk, intelligent
completions have since proven their value in managing
production from multilateral wells, horizontal wells with
multiple zones, wells in heterogeneous reservoirs, and
mature reservoirs. According to the Henderson, many of
5 SPE PDPU Fest 2016
BSPs wells off Brunei have been optimized using smart
field technologies.
There are three types in the horizontal drilling based on
the radius of curvature where the wells with short radius
have inclination of 2 to 60 / 30 m of horizontal
displacement, Medium radius wells with 8 to 200 / 30 m
and extend up to 1000 m or more. Much advancement in
this horizontal drilling has been made and this technique
is being incorporated in all the situations, but it also has
its weakness like casing design and cementing problem
many horizontal wells are completed as open hole.
The casing for this type of
drilling we need to know the loads applied on the casing
string. The horizontal drill trajectory clearly shows the well
is divided into three intervals: horizontal, build up section,
vertical section. All these different sections have the
different loads applied on them.
Horizontal section-
This section of the well is almost horizontal with 80 to
900 inclination with vertical. The section is subjected
to torque and drag forces which are the result from
the contact of the pipe to bore hole. Two factors affect
sliding wellbore friction which is coefficient of friction
and normal contact and their product gives magnitude
of friction force (2). The value of the sliding friction
depends on the contacting material and degree of
lubrication at various places.
Figure 6: Horizontal Section
From the figure it is clear that
Ft = W cos + Fn
Torsional increment M=*Fn*r
The calculations are done for 5, 7, and 9 with
coefficient of friction 0.2 to 0.4 and found the load for
casing having weight 18lb/ft.
This gives that we need to push at the build-up section
for both open and closed end Casing because there
is huge load which can damage the casing so it
should be considered.
Build Up Section-
It changes both in direction and inclination which
implies it has drag and bending loads on the casing.
Their inclination varies from 5 to 50o per 100 feet and
the load is mostly compressive and it iv=creases with
the increase in the horizontal section
Vertical Section-
The load is maximum at the starting of the well bore
and it is equal to the weight of the casing string and
the load at kick off point.
Drawbacks of Snake Well Design:
Snake well has shown significant improvement in the
production or recovery of oil from the reservoirs and in
some cases, even better than vertical drilling. During its
implementation, challenges regarding its placement and
control of the wells occurred due to its completely new
design but smart completion method tackled the
challenges easily with the advanced flow control valves,
sensors and other productive tools. The challenge related
to dismantling and reassembling equipment were easily
brought down by using mobile drilling units moved
between pads which automatically brought the cost down
by 10-20%. In spite of all the challenges and limitations
occurred and solved,
The present day design of the snake well still contains
flaws and drawbacks leading to high risk and uncertainty.
Some of the drawbacks related to its design are:
Missing of Target Zones
The design of snake well uses extended reach
drilling with directional drilling technique moving
like a snake increase the risk of accidentally miss
the target zone due to geological uncertainty and
may hit the neighboring water bearing zones,
decreasing production of oil.
6 SPE PDPU Fest 2016
Non Unique Log and Data Interpretation
Since the snake moves through the complex
horizontal path cutting different layers of shale
packages through the reservoirs increase the
chances to get stratigraphically lost due to non-
unique logs.
Condition of Hole with Time
Although the use of smart completion methods
has helped to maintain the well clean but up to
few meters and beyond that, the well hardly get
cleaned and the toe hardly contributes to the flow
rather increase the hindrance.
Breakthrough of Water/Gas at Heel
At initial stages, due to the difference in size of
toe and heel during the drawdown there is a high
risk of breakthrough of water or gas which lead to
decrease the formation pressure and ultimately
lead to decrease in the production
Proposed techniques for Improving the Oil Extraction
percentage:
1.In snake drilling technique, there is a probability that the
drill bit misses the exact target location and may hit the
adjacent water containing sandstone or geological
uncertainty leading to the decrease in the production of
oil. Hence the following method is proposed to reduce the
chances of this to happen.
All of the horizontal wells drilled are done taking into
the account of geological parameters of the formation. We
can steer the well using the geological information we get
from the drill bit cuttings which comes out with the mud.
This helps us know that the drill bit had hit a zone of sand
or gravel. Also we get to know through the rate of
penetration in the particular formation. For example, the
rate of penetration in porous formation is more than that
of hard formations. That means the ROP changes
depending upon the type of formation encountered. So for
the drill bit not to get accidentally enter into neighboring
water bearing zones we previously get the information
about the type formation we have entered. For this we
implement Schlumberger iPZIG system. It is image
Gamma and an inclination tool positioned directly behind
the bit. It reduces the reaction time for making the critical
geo steering decisions and maintaining the wellbore in the
targeted region. Hence it helps in maintaining the original
well trajectory without allowing the drill bit to enter other
unnecessary paths. Thus, this would result in no loss of
percentage of oil.
The chance of the drill bit to hit a water bearing
layer can be predicted by sudden thinning of the drilling
fluid, dropping of the water temperature, drop in level of
drilling fluid and sudden increase in speed of drilling.
2. Sometimes the previously isolated or separated fluid
or some other fluids which are present in the formation
gets access to the producing wellbore mainly water and
gas. These cause a serious problem which would lead to
decrease in the formation pressure and leads to greater
decrease in the production. This interruption of
unwanted well fluids such as water and gas shows its
impact on wells and its reservoir performance. In
addition to this there might be also a sand inflow into the
ICD. Simple sand control is not enough the flow control
must also be done together to maximize the oil
production. To accomplish this task we equip MeshFlux
with special inflow control devices which are places
along the production intervals to equalize the production
from toe to heal. MeshFlux integrates meshrite which
works under nozzle based flow control.
The reservoir fluid first passes
through the meshrite sand control medium and then
along the outside of the base pipe to the nozzles at the
end of the base pipe. These nozzles which are viscosity
independent help to equalize the pressure from the heel
to toe inside the pipe the helps in the influx of oil. In case
of homogeneous formations, the oil which is at high
pressure tends to enter the heel of ICD which is at low
pressure creating damage to the toe. But as the mesh
flux ICD helps to equalize the pressure from the heel to
toe that helps in entering of oil into ICD equally.
Concluding Remarks:
Hence Snake well drill technology increases the
production and decreases the cost of production.
In case of the Champion West Oil field in Brunei there is
an increase of 300 billion barrels of oil due to the
introduction of the snake drill technology.
The proposed methods would eliminate the drawbacks
of this kind of wells and should help in the improvement
of the oil extraction percentage from the drilled snake
wells.
Nomenclature:
BSP: Brunei Shell Petroleum
CER: Containerized Electrical Room
ROP: Rate of penetration
MWD: Measuring While Drilling
AND: Azimuthal Density Neutral Tool
CDR: Compensated Dual Resistivity Tool
ICD: Inflow control Device
7 SPE PDPU Fest 2016

4. editions.sciencetechnologyactions.com/lessons2-
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1. absolutetect.com/flowcontrol/meshflux
2. Combination of Snake Well Design & Smart
5. Smart snake wells in champion west-Expected and
Completions: Key Enablers for Champion West
Unexpected Benefits from Smart Completion SPE
Development. SPE 88524. Aidiradiman Haji
100880, W.Obendrauf, K.Schrader, N. Al-Farsi and A.
Johan (Brunei Shell Petroleum Company Sdn. Bhd) kirby White, SPE, Brunei Shell Petroleum Co. Sdn. Bhd.
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3. Pehin Dato Haji Mohammad, Minister Of Energy , 6.www.glossary.oilfield.slv.com/terms/breakthrough.aspx

Brunei Development And Environment

Author Contact Details

B Sreeranga Pradyumna
Mobile: 8171949239
Email: pradyumnabellamkonda@gmail.com

G Sai Akhil
Mobile: 9505145382
Email: godavarthiakhil009@gmail.com

Ankur Dwivedi
Mobile: 9807029205
Email: ankurdwivedi320@gmail.com