China's shale gas reserves are among the highest in the world. However, the core technology of high-end drilling equipment used in shale gas development was once monopolized by foreign companies. Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation and PetroChina jointly solved this problem in ten years. Why is it so difficult to get high-end drilling equipment from scratch? What revolutionary changes will its breakthrough bring to China's shale gas exploitation?

Ten billion market ushered in China's high-end drilling equipment

When the reporter came to the Qiulin oil and gas field in Santai County, Sichuan Province, the staff of the drilling team were hoisting the rotary steering system onto the drilling platform. This suit is 11.5 meters long, which is equivalent to the height of a four-story building.

Lv Wei, deputy general manager of Tianshi Hechuang Company, Third Academy of Aerospace Science and Industry Group: Use a crane to hoist the instrument to the wellhead for testing. After the test is normal, we will drill into the well.

According to the on-site staff, the design depth of this oil and gas well is 3300 meters. With the help of the domestic rotary steering system, it only takes more than 20 days for the well to be drilled. In the past, it took about 50 days to drill such a well with traditional equipment. Now not only save half of the time, but also save more than 1.5 million yuan in cost per well.

The rotary steering system can travel autonomously in any direction in the formation, allowing a drill bit with a diameter of 0.2 meters to travel horizontally or obliquely and stably in a thin oil layer less than 1 meter, like smelling "oil smell", to establish a channel for oil and gas exploitation. Behind such intelligence is the use of inertial navigation and control technology used on spacecraft, combined with oil drilling engineering technology, through comprehensive innovation, to help my country's oil and gas development achieve independent control of core key technologies.

Recently, good news has also come from the international market. With the rotary steering system from China, the 420 well in the Lechica Oilfield in Belarus has been successfully drilled. One trip to drill completed the well operation with a depth of 4150 meters, which caused quite a stir in the local area. So far, domestic high-end oil equipment has achieved a zero breakthrough in the international market. The international market capacity of rotary steering system is about 10 billion yuan per year. With this domestic equipment, 204 wells have been drilled so far.

Le Hong, deputy general manager of PetroChina Southwest Oil and Gas Field Company: some wells were not exploitable, but now they can not only be developed, but also can be developed efficiently.

From undevelopable to developable, the difference is that now has its own domestic high-end equipment. Shale gas belongs to unconventional natural gas, which is difficult to develop and costly. When China's shale gas exploitation started, foreign oil service companies brought a rotary steering system, which made Chinese oil people who were still drilling wells in the traditional way envied: for the same well, the drilling time with foreign equipment was twice as long as that with domestic equipment. However, the equipment of foreign companies is only rented but not sold.

Le Hong, deputy general manager of PetroChina Southwest Oil and Gas Field Company: He came to an engineer with a small piece of rotary steering tools. His daily operating cost is 4 to 5 times that of our team of 40 people on this large drilling rig.

Bai Jing, deputy dean of PetroChina Chuanqing Drilling and Production Engineering Technology Research Institute: The geological conditions in our Sichuan-Chongqing area are very complicated. During this process, they will withdraw when they encounter a little risk. The most unacceptable thing is that he feels that the risk is high. Send an email at any time, and then take the personnel and the equipment to withdraw.

China's land shale gas recoverable resources are 25.1 trillion cubic meters. The Sichuan-Chongqing area is listed as a national shale gas development demonstration area. However, the cost of renting foreign equipment for mining is high. In order to wait for foreign equipment, it often happens that an engineering team stops drilling for one or two months. The longest waiting time is 63 days, which seriously affects the mining progress. Independent research and development of rotary steering system with high drilling efficiency is imminent.

37 failures, "entering the ground" is no less difficult than "climbing the sky"

In order to overcome the core technical difficulties of high-end drilling equipment, PetroChina found the cooperation of Aerospace Science and Industry Group. However, what the two partners did not expect was that the mature technology already used on the Shenzhou spacecraft and the Chang'e series of probes, when solving the problem of drilling into the ground, it took a whole decade to overcome the technical difficulties because of "acclimatization.

Using aerospace inertial navigation and control technology, the development team completed the development of the principle prototype of the rotary steering system in three years. After many ground tests, the product has good performance. But during the first downhole test, something unexpected happened.

Sun Quanhua, Chairman of Tianshi Chuang Company, Third Academy of Aerospace Science and Industry Group: Our prototype did not have any signal when going into the well for the first time. Finally, it was found that there was a problem with the sealing. The whole instrument was grouted by mud from beginning to end. It turned out that it would take at least dozens of hours to work underground before there would be a problem, but it turned out that there would be a problem without even working for a minute.

Three years of hard work, millions of investment, a test is zero. High temperature, high pressure, high vibration, and the harsh working environment in the underground are far beyond the imagination of astronauts.

Yue Bujiang, Chief Engineer of Tianshi Chuangchuang Company, Third Academy of Aerospace Science and Industry Group: The rotary steering system is a technology that is difficult to tame. I have always compared it to a Sun Wukong. It needs not only the golden eye to identify oil and gas, but also a gold-banded rod that can connect the underground with the ground before it can extract oil and gas.

Don't underestimate this "golden hoop bar" with a diameter of only more than 20 centimeters. It integrates eight modules, including measurement while drilling, power generation communication, central control, and guidance. It has nearly 30000 parts, which is equivalent to an underground intelligent robot.

Lu Dengyun, chief expert of CNPC Chuanqing Drilling: It is mainly an intelligent tool integrating machinery, electronics, hydraulics, measurement and control. The success of each component determines the reliability of our entire functional performance.

In the Zhuozhou Industrial Park of the Third Academy of Aerospace Science and Industry Group, what is being processed on the intelligent production line is the accelerometer, the core component of the rotary guidance system.

Wu Nan, deputy chief designer of the accelerometer of the Third Academy of Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation: This is equivalent to an eye on the rotary steering system to find the oil block we need.

The quartz pendulum on the accelerometer can work stably under the vibration of up to 6G when the Shenzhou spacecraft is launched. However, the maximum vibration reached 20g during the downhole test, and the pendulum was instantly broken, resulting in "blindness" of the equipment ".

How to improve the design and improve the anti-vibration function of the equipment underground is one of the difficult problems to be solved by the astronauts. The most difficult thing they encountered during the test was that there was no signal downhole, which led to the loss of contact downhole.

Ma Huibin, deputy director of the instrument department of Tianshi Chuangchuang Company, Third Academy of Aerospace Science and Industry Group: The most common failure phenomenon we have experienced in recent years is no signal. A total of 37 test failures caused by no signal are caused. As a result of all downhole instrument failures, the first performance will be no signal.

37 defeats, 37 again from the beginning. Find the cause of no signal, improve, and then re-use the instrument into the well for verification. For more than five years, a joint research and development team of more than 80 people from PetroChina and the Third Academy of Aerospace has been repeating this process. There are dozens of drill collars that are broken underground.

Repeated battles and repeated defeats, repeated defeats and repeated battles. After the signal problem was solved, the system reliability problem soon became a roadblock: to achieve industrial application, the product needed to work steadily for 200 hours to pass, but the average working life at that time was less than 20 hours. Five years have passed in a flash. At this time, the research funding is already stretched. If there is no breakthrough in technology, the project will face the fate of dismissing.

Ma Huibin, deputy director of the instrument department of Tianshi Chuangchuang Company, the Third Academy of Aerospace Science and Industry Group, said: I don't want to do it, don't do it, do you really don't do it? I even considered the dismission of the project. But I really quit. This is also the painstaking effort for many years. This thing is just like one's own child. Make it 1.1. No, I cried as I said it.

The state supports the core technology of drilling equipment to achieve independent control.

R & D personnel told reporters that the research and development of rotary steering system is difficult to apply in engineering. The geological conditions and engineering difficulties of each well are different, and the equipment must adapt to all complex geological conditions in order to realize industrialization. More than a dozen units in China have been tackling key problems for five to 10 years, and most of them have given up halfway. At a time when the cooperation project between PetroChina and Aerospace Science and Industry may be dismounted, the state's policy adjustment on the development of high-end equipment has made the project come true.

In view of the development of high-end equipment manufacturing industry, the state has issued a series of policies and plans in recent years, clearly pointing out that it is necessary to accelerate the development of high-end equipment manufacturing industry and promote the traditional equipment manufacturing industry to move towards the middle and high end.

At the juncture when the development of the rotary steering system encountered a bottleneck, it was approved by the State.

Bai Jing, deputy dean of PetroChina Chuanqing Drilling and Production Engineering Technology Research Institute: The first is the support of the project. I will let you continue to work. The second is financial support, and the third is various test conditions and verification conditions, including the conditions for the organization of some special R & D personnel, that is, for the R & D team, you can put forward whatever you want. The science and technology department of the group will coordinate, organize and arrange with the greatest ability.

Although in the process of tackling key problems, they encountered the problems of high temperature and slope, but PetroChina and Aerospace Science and Industry Group organized many academicians on-site guidance.

Bai Jing, Vice President of Chuanqing Drilling and Production Engineering Technology Research Institute of PetroChina: Academician Sun Jinsheng reminded us that we must consider the redundancy of the electronic control system in the design process. Later, we found that many problems occurred due to the special working conditions in the mine, which brought about insufficient redundancy design and failures.

After the improvement according to the expert's suggestion, the reliability of the equipment has been greatly improved. In ten years, the rotary steering system finally passed the project acceptance organized by the National Energy Administration with the achievement of breaking through six key technologies.

While domestic equipment continues to obtain technological breakthroughs, the equipment of foreign companies has also quietly reduced prices.

Bai Jing, deputy dean of PetroChina Chuanqing Drilling and Production Engineering Technology Research Institute: The operating cost of a single well has dropped from more than 600 million yuan to less than 2 million yuan.

At present, the localization rate of the rotary steering system has reached 100 percent, and the overall performance has reached the world's advanced level.

Sun Quanhua, Chairman of Tianshi Chuang Company, Third Academy of Aerospace Science and Industry Group: What we want is not only to unite for technological innovation, but also to manage innovation and mechanism innovation in the future, so as to open up all our talents, funds and industrial chain, update and iterate our existing products, develop more high-end equipment in the future, and do our part for the country's energy security.

(Reporter Cui Xiawen of the General Station is Weimin, Wang Gang, Wen Xiao, Zhang Junqing)

(source: CCTV news client)