Advances in Instrumented Coring

Core drilling has been a central part of petroleum exploration drilling for many decades, yet some significant challenges still adhere to conventional core extraction methods and technologies. These challenges could conceivably be addressed by modern instrumentation of the core drilling assembly, but commercial offerings remain limited.

The Intelligent Coring System (ICS) is a joint development project between Norwegian technology company CoreAll and the operator companies Lundin, Spirit Energy, and DEA. The objective is to design a fully instrumented core drilling assembly that can log essential formation and fluid parameters along with downhole diagnostic, transmit the data to surface in real time, and allow the addition of further technologies. A prototype version of this core drilling assembly, designed to collect 3” rock formation cores in 8 1/2” near-vertical tangent hole sections, was recently run in a test well in Norway with good results.

Four coring runs were performed on concrete in a pre-drilled, shallow well. Three of these provided 100% core recovery. Resistivity and gamma ray was logged for all runs, with additional downhole diagnostics data. Downhole electronics and surface decoding were 100% operational throughout. RT data density was approximately 6 points/meter; memory data exceeded 2000 lines per meter.