Post Well Vibration Analysis in the North Sea: A Tool to Understand Drilling Performance

Severe drill stem vibrations could leads to excessive damage to the bottom hole assembly causing an increase in nonproductive time. Different drill stem vibrations models are used to predict and avoid resonance regions by optimizing the selection of bottom hole assembly components and operating parameters such as weight on bit, and surface RPM. In addition to avoid the resonance regions, specialized tools have been developed to reduce vibrations. However a complete understanding on how to mitigate vibration and its effect on drilling performance is still lacking. This study investigates the cause of drill stem vibrations, its effect on drilling performance, and the effect of including vibration reductions tools in the bottom hole assembly design in several recent drilled wells in the North Sea. Vibration damping tools used in this study were able to reduce both lateral and torsional drill stem vibration compared to a well with no vibration damping tool. Torsional drill stem vibrations tend to increase through rich sand zones causing an increase in lateral vibrations. The impact drill stem vibrations have on drilling performance was identified through rate of penetration. As lateral vibration intensity increases, instantaneous rate of penetration decreases