What to Consider When Implementing MPD in Deepwater

Are you planning a deepwater drilling campaign and wondering if Managed Pressure Drilling (MPD) is worth the investment? Have you considered what challenges or savings MPD could bring to your specific well?

MPD plays a key role in deepwater drilling, where conventional methods often struggle due to narrow operating windows and increasing well complexity. In these environments, maintaining stable bottom-hole pressure becomes critical to avoid losses and influxes. 

In this article, we outline the key factors you need to consider when evaluating MPD– including cost, potential cost savings, drillability, and influx management. The goal is to provide you with a clearer basis for deciding whether MPD is the right fit for your next deepwater operation.

Cost

One of the first factors to evaluate is the cost of implementing MPD. Deepwater operations already come with high baseline costs and adding an MPD system will increase the overall budget.  MPD packages are typically more expensive on floaters compared to fixed installations, and integration costs can vary significantly between rigs. Some rigs are designed to be “MPD ready”, while others may already include MPD as part of the rig setup and day rate.

Speaking of day rates – will the use of MPD add time to your operation? Depending on the MPD method, multiple displacements may be required, along with reduced tripping speeds. In deepwater operations, both displacements and tripping take extra time, and this should be accounted for when estimating total costs.

Check out: 11 Things All Drilling and Completion Engineers Need to Know About MPD

Cost saving

Hand in hand with the cost consideration is the need to evaluate where MPD can add value beyond simply enabling drilling.

• Can sections be extended – particularly in the reservoir?
• Can sections be combined to eliminate a casing or liner and simplify the well design?
• Can MPD be applied across multiple sections of the well?  
• Can production be improved by applying MPD during completion?
• Can operational time be reduced by selecting an MPD method that allows higher tripping speeds and avoids flat-time?

Each of these questions can uncover opportunities where MPD becomes a tool for optimization, not just mitigation.

Drillability

The primary reason for using MPD today is still to enable drilling sections that would otherwise be difficult or not feasible with conventional methods.

Doing a risk assessment estimating the likelihood of requiring contingency liners, with or without MPD, is useful. As part of this evaluation, it is also important to assess the cementing operations and determine whether MPD is needed to secure a satisfactory cement job.

One example for the risk assessment could be to evaluate the potential for losses:

• Is there a high likelihood of losses occurring?
• How long did it take to recover from similar events in previous wells?
• How much can the likelihood of losses be reduced by using MPD? 

These considerations directly affect the technical feasibility and overall efficiency of the well construction process, together with expected costs for drilling and completing the well.

Learn more about MPD here.

Influx Management

Influx management can be more challenging in deepwater operations due to added friction in the choke circulation system, which can make conventional well control challenging.
At the same time, narrow pressure margins increase the probability of gains and losses.

Illustration of the narrow drilling pressure window in deepwater operations and how MPD can improve pressure management and influx handling.

MPD enables earlier identification and handling of influxes through a dedicated return line and continuous flow monitoring. This is a key reason why many deepwater campaigns choose MPD.

Conclusion

Setting up cost estimations specific for each well or campaign is important pre-work when considering MPD for deepwater operations. MPD is an expensive tool, but it can also unlock significant cost savings. 

MPD can be seen as an additional capability that reduces uncertainty, but it requires a clear understanding of the likelihood and consequences of challenging events such as losses and influxes. While this assessment is not always straightforward, the considerations outlined in this article give you a more practical basis for deciding whether MPD is the right choice for your next deepwater operation.