RESEARCH ARTICLE
Influence of Altitudes and Air Humidity to the Minimum Gas Injection Rate in Air Underbalanced Drilling
Baojiang Sun*, Changsheng Xiang, Zhiyuan Wang
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2012Volume: 5
First Page: 104
Last Page: 108
Publisher Id: TOPEJ-5-104
DOI: 10.2174/1874834101205010104
Article History:
Received Date: 19/3/2012Revision Received Date: 31/7/2012
Acceptance Date: 3/8/2012
Electronic publication date: 04/10/2012
Collection year: 2012
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Three aspects, such as the optimization of calculation model for the minimum gas injection rate, the effect of elevation on the minimum gas injection rate, the effect of air humidity on the minimum gas injection rate, have been reviewed in this paper. Considering the influence of altitude and air humidity, correction factor for gas injection rate is calculated. The value of gas injection for altitude correction factor generally increases with the increase in altitude, especially when conducting air drilling in high altitude areas of western China the correction factor of Qinghai oilfield can be calculated as high as 1.5. When the air humidity increases, the gas injection humidity correction factor also increases; especially before raining in summer, the air humidity correction factor can be close to 1.1, under the condition of relatively high air humidity and temperature. In the light of the calculation result and example analysis, it can be found that combining with this article’s altitude and air humidity correction, the result of the amended minimum kinetic energy standard using Boyun Guo’s correlation is the closest to the actual one, which can be used for the calculation of the minimum gas injection rate in industry practice while other methods have relatively larger errors.