What are Popular Characteristics of Drilling Techniques?

It is normal for drilling operations to come with several objectives, and there is nothing unusual to that. Sometimes, this may involve collecting rock samples from a specific underground location and bringing it up to the surface.

This is just one of several kinds of drilling techniques and is referred to as core drilling work. 

Normally, exploration wells come in varying depths. The deepest so far has reached around 12, 345 m, and you will find this in Eastern Russia, near the Sakhalin island. Besides collecting samples of rock, drill holes will also let you carry out several geophysical measurements. A physical property’s continuous variation description along a well is referred to as a log. 

drilling progress

For instance, when it comes to describing borehole variations during the propagation of sound waves velocity, sonic logging can be taken advantage of, i.e. emitted waves in a frequency range covering our hearing range sensitivity. 

Most often than not, the purpose of drilling is to produce fluids in the rock at a certain depth, regardless if it is intended for hydrocarbons (from a depth of 2000 to 7000m), for drinking water, or geothermal fluids (in the 150 – 5000 m range). 

These kinds of holes are drilled by virtue of a destructive method, the rock will need to get crushed in place with the help of a powerful drill head. The drill bit can be used for this purpose also but needs to be pushed by a drill string.  

The cuttings or the rock debris are taken up to the surface and this is made possible by the use of the mud circulation process, which the drill string injects.  If there is a compelling reason to, necessary adjustments can be made to this slurry and its viscosity to help optimize its cutting removal. Doing so will help ensure that the borehole stability and integrity will be preserved, even when there is a drilling activity  in progress.  

When drilling shallow wells that are intended for the production of drinking water, many contractors choose to employ the simplest, easy to manage drilling techniques available, making use also of  the hole hammer. Such a technique for drilling is synonymous to that of a jackhammer in terms of how it goes, the drill string will work to bring the compressed air to the bottom. Keep in mind that the air pressure here must be sufficient enough to lift the weight of the water that is filling the borehole. 

For better understanding, blowers that are powerful enough to reach pressures around 100 bar can be taken advantage of at depths not above 80 m. In an ideal world, this drilling technique is used mainly for 200 m depth boreholes or less.  

Boreholes must be tubed regularly after they reach a certain depth level, which will help put balance in the stresses the rock supports at the borehole wall. This kind of operation is referred to as the casing of the well, where the casing is the steel pipe left in place. The casing will have a designated number of slots that will make it possible for its required fluid produced during the manufacturing stage. 

Most of the time, the casing is cemented, which will help in keeping any fluid from going up along the borehole. The moment the casing is secured inside a watertight manner, production fluid is ensured. This can be attributed to the perforations made possible by the different types of techniques that operators often say are varying.  

In conventional drilling techniques, one hand would allow your drill string to infuse the mud used in extracting rock debris while on the other make the drilling tool rotate on its axis. This type of rotation operation comes with significant amounts of friction throughout the process, causing the drill string to wear out fast for deep drilling. 

To overcome these hurdles, self-rotating drill heads without needing to rotate the drill string was developed gradually. Besides, these turbines were designed with a mechanism that will make it possible for it to control the direction of the drilling action. Such techniques for drilling allow for horizontal drilling operations over a minimum of 10-kilometer distances.