Snake Wells

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Snake Wells is a term used by Shell Oil to refer to a series of oil wells drilled in the Champion West oil field offshore Brunei.[1][2] The wells used a combination of technologies including extended reach drilling, swellable wellbore packers and remotely operated zonal isolation and control. The directional drilling technique allows the path of the well to be directed to achieve contact with as many potentially producing features as possible. This results in a "snake like" well path which weaves up and down through multiple geological features in order to achieve maximum reservoir drainage.

Shells marketing suggests that this approach is an invention of Shell, however in reality the technologies involved have all been used before elsewhere.

Shell's marketing states:

The creative minds at Shell refused to accept that so much pefectly good oil was going to waste - so they decided to do something about it. The snake well drill is a ground breaking piece of technology that allows us to extract oil from these previously hard to reach places. Unlike conventional drills, state of the art software allows the snake well drill to follow complex horizontal paths, cutting through shale and sand to reach a number of different reservoir pockets from a single drilling platform.[3]

However despite the high complexity of the wells, the articles published in the industry publications refer only to existing technologies.

References

  1. ↑ [1] Smart Wells article in World Oil
  2. ↑ [2] Smart wells article in "Offshore" magazine."
  3. ↑ [3] Snake Well Marketing from Shell


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