Enhancing well control for offshore and deepwater operations is an opportunity that I expect we all would like to realize.   The incentives include protecting our offshore personnel’s lives, our shareholders’ investments, the most productive coastal environment in our country, the livelihoods of people on the Gulf Coast, and the reputation of our profession and industry.  The challenges to realizing this opportunity range from providing effective, relevant training for our personnel to developing plans to prevent, detect, and control failures in deepwater systems that are still being developed to insuring our organizations really contribute to consistent operational success despite the uncertainties and complications involved.  This talk is intended to facilitate the process of identifying the challenges that must be addressed, raising the questions that must be answered, and finding relevant, practical answers that lead to systems, procedures, and organizations that will achieve ever more effective well control in our future deepwater operations.

Real-time pressure prediction has become a vital service to assist drilling, particularly in challenging exploratory environments. Moreover, ever-increasing global compliance regulations to ensure safe drilling execution have resulted in the need to adopt best-in-class practices for real-time pore pressure prediction services, including a stronger integration with pre-drill modeling and workflows. The way forward is to adopt a holistic approach that gives a better understanding of the overpressure-generating mechanisms. Creating a detailed pre-drill model, applying the appropriate methodologies, and using more reliable input data help provide a more constrained prediction of pore fluid pressure and a truer reflection of the inherent uncertainties. Another area of improvement is to ensure that the correct logging-while-drilling measurements are used in real-time pore pressure prediction as determined by the pre-drill geomechanical model.