Research on Gas-liquid Flow Rate Optimization in Foam Drilling

With the advantages of less gas consumption, higher carrying rocks ability, lower leakage and higher penetration rate, foam drilling is widely used today in petroleum industry. In the process of foam underbalanced drilling, the mixture of gas, liquid and cuttings flows upwards through the annular, so it is a typical gas-liquid-solid multi-phase flow. In order to protect the reservoir and avoid borehole wall collapsing during foam drilling, it is crucial to ensure that the bottom hole pressure is lower than the formation pressure and higher than the formation collapse pressure, and in the mean time, foam drilling fluid in the whole wellbore should be in the best foam quality stage in order to have sufficient capacity to carry cuttings. In this paper, main relations between bottom hole pressure and gas-liquid injecting rate are analyzed with the underbalanced multiphase flow models. And in order to obtain precise flow pattern and flow pressure, the whole well bore is spatial meshed and iterative method is used. So, a convenient safety window expressed by gas-liquid injecting rate is obtained instead of that by bottom hole pressure. Finally, a foam drilling example from a block in Yemen is presented; the drilling results show that this method is reliable and practical.