December 10, 2007 - Curvaceous Software announces the grant of their sixth patent, this time by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for real-time control of the drilling of oil and gas wells. The patent captures the performance envelope of the best drill operator as an n-dimensional solid object and then reproduces this experience as real-time guidance for less-experienced operators thus reducing the variability in performance that is inherent between different drill operators.
This new and very different approach to controlling a drilling rig is based on the innovative and highly acclaimed Geometric Process Control (GPC) technology, which is well-established in over 100 downstream process industries and has already achieved success in problem-solving and offshore process improvement applications with several major North Sea operators.
This extension to GPC offers solutions to adaptively control a drill in real time without the need of any mathematical knowledge or the ability to describe problems with algebraic or differential equations. Dr Robin Brooks of Curvaceous Software Ltd will be speaking of this new approach to drilling oil wells cheaper and faster in his presentation on 26th February 2008 at the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ Intelligent Energy conference in Amsterdam. He is in complete agreement with the co-chair of the conference that it is vital for the oil and gas industry to embrace more efficient methods that enable better production performance.
Dr Brooks says “what we have demonstrated with this technology and the subsequent patent is that controlling drilling rigs should not be over-complicated and therefore adding to production expenditure. In this day and age there should be procedures that allow seamless knowledge transfer for better efficiency. GPC tools let you do exactly that and hence decrease variability.”
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