Measurement While Drilling, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1Stories from the Field, Fundamental Questions and Solutions

This chapter might aptly be entitled “Confessions of a confused, high-tech engineer.” And here’s why. In my previous reincarnation, I was Manager, Turbomachinery Design, at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, United Technologies Corporation, the company that supplied the great majority of the world’s commercial jet engines. Prior to that, I had served as Research Aerodynamicist at Boeing, working with pioneers in computational fluid dynamics and advanced wing design. What qualified me for these enviable positions was a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in acoustic wave propagation – and I had joined a stodgy M.I.T. from its even stodgier cross-town rival, the California Institute of Technology. These credentials in acoustics and fluid mechanics design made me eminently qualified to advance the state-of-the-art in Measurement-While-Drilling (also known as, “MWD”) telemetry – or so I, and other companies, unknowingly thought. At this juncture in my life, a tumultuous journey through the Oil Patch begins.

1.1 Mysteries, Clues and Possibilities.

As a young man, I had dreaded the idea of forever making incremental improvements to aircraft systems, merely as a mainstay to the art of survival and paying the mortgage, sitting at the same desk, in the same building, for decades on end. That possibility, I believed, was a fate worse than death. Thus, in that defining year, I would answer a Schlumberger employment ...