A major innovation that turns an oil and gas drill pipe into a high-speed data transmission tool capable of sending data from the bottom of a well 100,000 times faster than technology in common use today was unveiled last week at the Society of Petroleum Engineers annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas.
The new system, named IntelliPipe, could revolutionize the way companies probe for oil and gas. It was developed by an engineering team of Grant Prideco, of Houston, Texas, and Novatek Engineering, of Provo, Utah, under a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
IntelliPipe is a drill pipe with built-in telemetry. It can transmit large amounts of data to the surface as fast as 1 million bits per second (MMbit/sec). It also will allow data to be sent the other direction just as fast, giving drillers the first-ever capability to "tell" a drilling tool what to do thousands of feet below the surface almost instantaneously.
The "smart pipe" has undergone several field tests and is expected to be introduced commercially sometime next year. Grant Prideco and Novatek have formed a joint venture called IntelliServ to market the technology.
The 1-MMbit/sec transmission speed is especially impressive given that for the last quarter century, oil and gas drillers have labored to read downhole drilling data at the painstakingly slow speed of 3 to 10 bit/sec. Even today's common computer modems ? at 56,000 bit/sec ? are speed demons compared to downhole drilling telemetry.
"The IntelliPipe is one of the most remarkable advances in drilling technology in the last 25 years," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said. "President Bush, in the National Energy Policy, directed me to pursue advanced technology in energy production. I think the IntelliPipe is exactly the type of technology we need to move our domestic production capabilities into the next century."
"In the drilling industry, the term 'real-time' has meant 'real limited' because the data rate has been so slow," said Mike Smith, the Energy Department's assistant secretary for Fossil Energy.
With the lightning-fast IntelliPipe system, however, drillers receive high-resolution data almost instantaneously. "The drill pipe is no longer just 'dumb iron.' Now it can be the conduit of a sophisticated computer network," Smith said.
The key to the new system is a unique non-contacting coupler embedded in connections between 30-ft-long sections of drill pipe. The coupler permits data to be sent across the connection and on through a high-speed cable attached to the inner pipe wall.
