Intelligent communications

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Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is used by a whole host of industries to accurately track merchandise across land, sea and air. But can RFID be adapted for oil company’s drilling activities? Petrowell’s Paul Day explains how.

Truly remote communication with downhole tools has been a hot topic for over 20 years in our industry. We have seen sonic, acoustic, electro-magnetic, microwave and a host of pulsed telemetry systems come to the fore. However, it is for others to argue the merits of these various systems. At Petrowell we identified RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) as a technology that could be readily adapted to our industry needs. The technology is simple and straight forward; over seven billion RFID tags are in use today across a host of industries, the result of huge investments by other industries over the course of the last 40 years. The challenge for our industry is the application of this technology. Simple tracking of assets such as drill pipe is no great leap, mirroring as it does tracking systems used from freight movement to supermarket inventory control.

Transmit

If one can put an RFID tag in proximity to a reader, it is possible to transmit instructions via the reader to the device in question. Petrowell first demonstrated this in 2005 where we opened and closed a simple well clean up circulation sleeve using RFID coded tags. The tags were dropped into the drill pipe, circulated downhole where these coded instructions, to open or close, were picked up by the antennae of the circulation sleeve.

RFID coded tags are now being used to set completion packers, operate completion mounted flow control valves, open and close FRAC and stimulation sleeves, operate open hole selective sealing and flow control systems as well as a host of drilling tools and integrated system applications. The mechanical challenges of the tools to be operated do not change, one still needs a reliable packer that will set and test, a sleeve that will open and close reliably; these are at least the same challenges that the industry has faced from day one.

RFID is not a panacea for all downhole communications; it does not have the bandwidth of say microwave technologies – it requires close proximity of tag and reader but it does offer some distinct advantages. Signal attenuation, the bugbear of sonic, acoustic and EM type technologies is virtually a non issue with RFID and such attenuation issues can be managed at tool level and not constrained by the operating environment. In simple terms, the reliability of the technology as a means to communicate with downhole devices is superior to other systems available, this is in no small part due to the fact that other industries have spent billions of dollars achieving this reliability; the oil industry focus need only be the technology’s application, a sufficiently large challenge.

Communication

The tags used transmit simple command codes to the tool, it is on board software and systems that translate these simple commands to more sophisticated actions thereafter; the communication with the downhole tool requires a signal jump measured in inches and not the thousands of feet of alternative methods. It is entirely possible to convert all hydraulic or electrically based completion and drilling tools to RFID operation, essentially every tool and system has the capability of being a remote operated intelligent tool or system. RFID as used in downhole applications was first pioneered by the Marathon Oil Company but Petrowell hold a worldwide licence for its application in downhole completions systems.

Paul Day is the business development Director of Petrowell Ltd. A graduate of Aberdeen University, Day has worked in the industry for 23 years and for the last 18 years in primarily cased and open hole completions.