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Parker rig 245 sets drilling record at Kuparuk
Randy Brutsche PNA Technical Editor
How far is 2 million feet? About 378 miles. How far is that? With 378 miles of gas in your tank, you can drive from Anchorage to Fairbanks and still do about 20 miles of sightseeing. What’s the point? That’s how far Parker Drilling Co. of Alaska’s rig 245 has drilled since starting operation on Dec. 25, 1991. The rig, under the control of Ronnie Martin’s crew, passed the 2 million foot mark around 6 p.m. on Oct. 28, 1998.
Since then, the rig has kept chewing down through the North Slope in search for more oil. At press time, it was going past the 2,039,716 cumulative foot mark on well 3K-24, on K pad in the Kuparuk River unit for ARCO Alaska Inc.
Along the way it has set other drilling records under the control of Parker’s highly competent drilling crews and management staff. Among those records are the top 10 drilling records for conventional and slim hole drilling for the most footage drilled in 24 hours including:
• 4,627 feet of 12-1/4 inch conventional hole in 24 hours
• 5,520 feet of 8-1/2 inch conventional hole in 24 hours
• 4,262 feet of 9-1/2 inch slim hole in 24 hours
• 3,331 feet of 6-3/4 inch slim hole in 24 hours
Other records indicate that Parker’s crew is not out to set speed records for the sake of speed. It is evident the crews take care of the rig and see to it that it’s operating at peak performance at all times. These records include:
• Deepest extended reach well drilled: 17,300 feet of 6-1/8 inch well bore.
• Deepest surface hole drilled: 10,236 feet of 12-1/4 inch hole
• 11,971 feet drilled on one bit in 67.35 hours
Parker’s rig 245 has drilled 225 wells as of press time. The average time it takes to drill a well is nine and a half days to drill an average depth of 4,918 feet of surface hole and 9,070 feet of well bore. Through all of this, the average down time was only 1.62 hours.
Even more impressive is the speed with which Parker can move rig 245 from one well to the next. Over its history, rig 245 has averaged a move time of just 3.61 hours. Bill Campbell, Parker’s operations manager, said, “Nobody else on the slope that I know of can move as quick as 245.”
The entire rig is elevated off of the ground on a system of tracks and wheels permanently attached to the rig. Even during drilling, none of the rig actually touches the ground surface. It remains suspended on its system of tracks and wheels.
Rig 245 has traveled nearly 500 miles in making 44 pad-to-pad moves.
At one time, the typical well spacing was 120 feet apart to accommodate the amount of room a drill rig needed to operate. Since then, the spacing dropped to 60 feet and then down to 30 feet. Now Parker’s rig 245 can drill wells as close as 10 feet apart, said Chuck Sullivan, former general manager of Parker Drilling Co. of Alaska. As a result of this smaller drilling rig technology, the drilling pads are much smaller than they used to be. Rig 245 wins safety award The rig has three modules, said Sullivan. The drill module, the utility module and the cuttings processing module all fit together to form rig 245. All of the cuttings brought up from the well bore are run into the cuttings processing module. The cuttings are fed into a ball mill that crushes the rock until it passes through vibrating sizing screens. Once the cuttings pass through the screens, they are either injected back down a disposal well hole, or washed and stored in an outside bin to be trucked away for later use in road and pad construction, said Sullivan.
The rig has won Parker’s President Award that recognizes Parker’s safest rig in its domestic fleet. In 1996 and 1997, rig 245 had a lost time accident rate of zero and won the safest land rig for the achievement. “Parker closed out 1998 with 1,341 days worked without a lost time accident, said Campbell.
Parker has shifted its safety award program’s focus from lost time accidents and the related statistics upstream to the attendance of safety meetings and requiring safety training.
According to a paper written by Parker’s safety director, Allen Graff and ARCO Alaska’s Denise Petrash and James Trantham, “The traditional incentive programs ... were based upon awarding significant bonuses based on statistical LTA results. An accident on one crew could cancel bonuses for all crews. Individual employees felt that they had little control over or input into their health, safety and environment training program on incentives. As a result, the incentive program became a punitive measure ...” It is widely recognized that such a condition inhibits the reporting of accidents or near misses.
“Now it’s performance goals,” said Sullivan. “They have to attend so many safety meetings — they have to do so many proactive actions.”
Like other drilling contractors on the North Slope, Parker uses DuPont’s STOP program to bring about an enhanced safety environment. Sullivan said it is not only a top-down approach whereby the management shows the leadership to spend the money to get the program going, but Parker is also trying to drive it from the bottom up.
“We don’t just have management hammering on the crews,” said Sullivan. “What we’re trying to do is give our crews the tools they need to develop this safety program. It’s a partnership between our clients, other contractors, our local and corporate management team and our employees.”
Sullivan related a story of a driller who threatened to shut down the entire drilling operation because of one subcontractor who did not have the proper safety equipment for the task he was doing. “Anybody on that rig, that sees an unsafe condition or operation ... can shut the complete operation down,” said Sullican.
Sullivan said the next effort to raise the bar of safety awareness is a monthly meeting of key personnel from drilling contractors, operators and support services to bring safety challenges together and then take them outside of Alaska’s North Slope to other industries and see how others are addressing the same concerns. These other industries are also bringing their safety challenges to Alaska’s oil and gas industry.
Campbell said many times that the credit for Parker’s success, in terms of safety, environmental protection and record setting production, rests entirely with the crews that operate rig 245. “You can’t say enough good about the guys up there on the rig,” he said.
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