Information, communication and control systems for subsea oil well drilling with automatic detection and handling of gas kicks
Contact: Professor Ole Morten Aamo

The desire to exploit the oil and gas resources in deep water areas and in environmentally vulnerable and weather exposed areas such as the arctic, calls for development of subsea technology for all aspects of the petroleum exploration and development process. This includes placing the drilling rig on the seabed. In order to carry out safe and environmentally responsible drilling from the seabed, a higher degree of automation than what is presently used is needed. An important safety issue in drilling is the handling of unforeseen gas inflow into the well (gas kick) that occurs when drilling into a high-pressure (undepleted) reservoir. Today, this is handled manually by operators. Precise control of pressure and flows in the drilling system will facilitate detection and handling of kicks in a fast and effective way, increasing safety and avoiding discharge of hydrocarbons to the environment. To achieve this, highly reliable information, communication and control systems need to be developed. Over the past year, our group has worked on the state- and parameter estimation problem for a dynamic drilling system. Due to the lack of downhole instrumentation, this is a prerequisite for control with automatic detection and handling of gas kicks. As the drilling process incorporates a number of procedures and events, this PhD project will focus on the development of a hybrid control system in the framework of hybrid and switched systems. Case studies will be used to demonstrate the performance of the new theory and methods.

References:

• Ø.N. Stamnes, J. Zhou, G.-O. Kaasa, and O.M. Aamo, “Adaptive observer design for the bottomhole pressure of a managed pressure drilling system,” Proceedings of the 47th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2008.
• J. Zhou, Ø.N. Stamnes, O.M. Aamo, and G.-O. Kaasa, “Adaptive output feedback control of a managed pressure drilling system,” Proceedings of the 47th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2008.
• Ø.N. Stamnes, Adaptive Observer for Bottomhole Pressure During Drilling, MSc Thesis, NTNU, 2007.
• J. Hespanha, D. Liberzon, and E. Sontag, “Nonlinear observability and an invariance principle for switched systems,” Proceedings of the 41st Conference on Decision and Control, 2002.
• J. Hespanha, A.S. Morse, “Switching between stabilizing controllers,” Automatica, vol. 38, no. 11, 2002.