oa Planning and Drilling Horizontal Wells in a Deep Water Environment, Campos Basin, Brazil

Deep water environment is a challenging one to operate and most of the production projects rely on horizontal wells to be economically feasible. Optimizing the well placement of these horizontals demands an integrated approach including many different professionals and ultimate geosteering tools. Nowadays we observed a increment in the usage of images, both resistivity and nuclear, that provided reliable data to identify bed boundaries allowing reactive actions in geosteering. New generation deep resistivity devices indeed enlarge the drilling capabilities enabling a proactive geosteering, that means detect and identify bed boundaries before the bit crosses them. These new technologies require a sophisticated monitoring environment which is accomplished in the Decision Support Center. In this center all real time data are analyzed by the project team, to achieve the final goal of optimizing the wellbore trajectory in order to maximize the reservoir exposure and minimize the mechanical hazards like severe doglegs or others to ensure the best completion and productivity of the horizontal well. In this paper we present a typical workflow in designing and executing a horizontal well, This workflow will be illustrated through several field examples applying the most recent technologies currently available.