Near Balance Drilling: Enhanced Safety and Real Time Control in Deepwater

Scope of the work is to describe the Near Balance Drilling (NBD) technology and the benefits it can bring to drilling operations in challenging environments. NBD is an advanced drilling technique developed to increase safety in drilling operations and allow drilling through formations with narrow margin between pore gradient and fracture gradient. The technology has been developed to be applied in all critical onshore and offshore wells and has recently been implemented on a deepwater High Pressure well drilled with a semi-submersible rig, with very positive results.