OVERVIEW

Air and gas drilling technology accounts for approximately 30% of the world's land oil and gas drilling operations. The technology is limited to use in mature sedimentary basins. Mature sedimentary basins are older basins that have competent subsurface rock formations that are cemented and are usually uplifted with little formation water remaining in them. Although modern air and gas drilling technology began in the United States in the 1930s, it is presently being used in drilling operations throughout the world's many oil and gas producing geologic provinces. It is important at this time in the development of this technology that the basic principles of the technology be communicated in a manner that all drilling personnel will understand.

Engineers and drilling supervisory personnel need to make predictive calculations in order to make their drilling operations efficient and cost-effective. The prediction calculations for air and gas drilling technology are complicated and will require the creation of calculation computer programs. There are sophisticated air and gas programs available commercially. However, in the tradition of most engineering fields, once the basic outline of the program has been determined, we tend to hand the "care and feeding" of the program over to the computer science department. The authors have chosen to use MathCad as our tool to communicate to the readers the details of how air and gas drilling predictive calculations are made. These MathCad solutions are very transparent and are written in a sequence that we would do by...