Development of oil well monitoring and control system

Kick is an unplanned and undesirable influx of formation fluid into the borehole which if not curtailed, may develop into a blowout. It may arise if the formation fluid flows into the wellbore in an unplanned fashion when the drilling mud hydrostatic head is insufficient to hold. A kick may escalate into a potentially catastrophic uncontrollable flow of reservoir fluids termed as blowout. If a blowout breaches surface containment, the fluid may ignite, resulting in inferno with loss of life and damage to the oil well facilities. This paper presents the development of an oil well monitoring and control system that is capable of preventing kick and its effects. The system comprises of a simulator, data acquisition and control and monitoring modules. The simulator comprises of sensors for the hook-load, stand pipe pressure, rotary per minute, major depth, mud weight, mud temperature, stroke per minute and other related parameters. The data acquisition module is required for data gathering, analysis and real time decision making for quick and effective service in oil well monitoring and control. It receives pulses or voltage signals from the sensors for storage or transmission. The control and monitoring module comprises of sub-modules for depth, drilling, flow and kick monitoring. The implementation of the proposed system was carried out in an environment characterized by Microsoft Access Database Management System and Microsoft Excel as backend, Visual Basic.Net served as the frontend while Microsoft Windows Operating System is the operational platform. The simulation of Nigeria’s Etim oil well monitoring and controlling operations was carried out and obtained results confirmed the suitability and practicality of the proposed system