BJ Services Completes Coiled Tubing Drilling Operation in North Sea

BJ Services Company has successfully completed a contract for Shell UK to provide coiled tubing drilling (CTD), engineering and solids control services for well GA03 on the Gannet Alpha Platform in the North Sea. BJ Services served as Shell’s primary source of coiled tubing drilling services for the Gannet operation.

Following onshore trials during in Aberdeen, BJ Services commenced the challenging sidetrack drilling operation in February 2005. Drilling operations proceeded throughout the spring. By April, BJ Services had completed the sidetrack, rigged down and backloaded the equipment. The entire CTD operation from mobilisation to demobilisation was completed in 81.5 days.

The Shell Gannet operation was carried out by an offshore team of 30 operatives assisted by onshore engineering staff and technicians based at BJ Services bases in Aberdeen and Great Yarmouth in the United Kingdom, and Emmen in the Netherlands. These individuals were selected for the operation due to their in-depth experience in coiled tubing drilling. The previous successful CTD operations that BJ Services carried out on three wells on the Emmen and Coevorden Fields in 2003 for Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij (NAM), a Shell-ExxonMobil joint venture, were cited by Shell UK as one of the key reasons that BJ Services was selected for the Gannet Alpha CTD operation.

The Complete Equipment Package

In order to carry out the drilling operation, BJ Services built a customised CTD injector support frame. This special frame was used to support the hydraulic injector, as the drilling blocks had previously been removed from the derrick. In addition to the coiled tubing equipment, BJ Services also supplied zone 2 ancillary equipment to fully support the operation, including mud pumps, an HP-LP iron package to handle drilling fluids, a data acquisition system, well control package, solids control unit featuring additional mud tanks, and a new mud gas separator.