Software for MWD, Wireline inclinometry and Geoscience to drill oil and gas wells well

• SurWay — calculation and correction of MWD and Wireline tri-axial magnetometers and accelerometers surveys
• No_lock — is a tiny script to keep your display and other computer components switched on forever
• Image_creator and time2DEPTH — are utilities for Geosteering Resistivity Tool Imaging Edition memory processing

Surveying is an inseparable part of directional drilling to allow accurate determination of wellbore position. SurWay.exe is a free MS Windows application designed:

• to calculate an Inclination and an Azimuth for MWD or Wireline tri-axial magnetometers and accelerometers measurements and
• to compensate the Azimuth for Axial Drill string Magnetic Interference.

Wellbore Azimuth determination errors might bring:

• collision risk;
• unclaimed area;
• overlapped area.

SurWay helps mitigate collision risk and maximize reservoir recovery by providing greater accuracy in realtime determination of wellbore azimuth.

What is the Short Collar Correction (SCC) of a magnetic azimuth?

A mathematical method of reducing effects of Drill string magnetic interference on survey data derived from tri-axial survey tools using reference data of a geomagnetic model.

Compared to formal math optimizations SurWay uses a natural physical view that gives the most accurate result.

Short Collar Correction Definitions

The X-axis is perpendicular to the tool's axis and points to a scribe line etched on a tool's nonmag sub. The Y-axis is also perpendicular to the tool's axis and rotated to 90º clockwise from the X-axis as viewed into the hole. The Z-axis goes along the axis of the tool and points down to the hole is being drilled.

X- and Y-axes magnetic measurements are assumed to be valid, the Drill string interference corrupts only a Z-axis magnetic measurement.

The Short collar Correction ignores Z-axis magnetic sensor measurements and uses X- and Y-axes magnetic sensors measurements and known reference geomagnetic field values: a magnitude of an intensity and its dip angle. The Z-axis value is altered to provide a minimum difference with reference values.

Limitations of the Short Collar Correction

Azimuth correction while drilling in «No-Go» zone — at high inclination East or West will be made with more uncertainty.

Magnetometers of a tool used with the Short Collar Correction of a magnetic azimuth require highly accurate calibration, because absolute magnitudes of geomagnetic field intensity vector components are used, not only ratios of the magnitudes of these components as for Long Collar surveys.

Using an incorrect reference magnetic field model corrupts the Short Collar Correction.

Short Collar Correction cannot fix an external magnetic influence on X- or Y-axes (Causes: Adjacent wellbores, highly magnetized BHA components, magnetic mud, ferrous formations, etc.).

Supported MWD and Wireline inclinometry systems

SurWay can automatically treat plain text files of two types: LAS and LOG. Such files are used by many MWD and Wireline inclinometry system. SurWay's Help consists examples of Settings for National Oilwell Varco's TolTeq and General Electric's Tensor® and other MWD Systems. But SurWay's Settings are very flexible, so you of course can tune another Survey system apart from the NOV or GE ones. Please share your experience in the Forum. Certainly SurWay can automatically treat MS Excel xls or xlsx input files and also it allows manual input of axes.

System requirements

MS Windows 7 (with the last updates) — Windows 10,.. Earlier versions are not supported, sorry, I have to concentrate efforts to support the Future. Shell Sucop works for Windows XP more or less well. If your OS is too old, the application will warn you.

SurWay will warn you if its version and its run-time library's one are different. Then you need to close the SurWay and clear your Windows TEMP directory because your computer hung up while SurWay was running and the TEMP directory consists old SurWay's run-time library. You can download and then run the following tiny clear_temp.bat file to clear you temp folder before running a new SurWay version or just to remove garbage temporary files time to time.

Time to time some antiviruses after some their databases updates consider that SurWay is a "Potentially Unwanted Software". What can I say? Their developers staffs have Potentially Definitely Inefficient Programmers. And who needs to intrude malicious code in such a rare software?

To be sure you can always check any file online. Here is the result for surway.zip:

Please be aware that if you've chosen two Fraction digits of accuracy or using Full Bt range (from 20 000 to 70 000 ηTesla) the Azimuth correction will require more time. Also the application might calculate a corrected azimuth about a minute if it met an ambiguous case, so you'll have enough time to do a pair of drops of tea. At last, if your computer is very very old or very very busy by parallel tasks, your Windows OS might ask: "Would you like to stop JavaScript?", please answer: "No".

The last version is 3.11 (Now SurWay can treat input Excel files. As support of old Windows has been terminated at all, SurWay becomes to use unicode (UTF-8) standard. Also the performance of optimal azimuth search was increased):

• Download clear_temp.bat — it's strongly recommended to run it before the first launching a new version of SurWay;
• Download SurWay.zip — just unpack into any place, doesn't require of setup;
• Discuss — you can check out receiving notifications about new releases of SurWay by e-mail here.

No_lock.js is a free tiny script to keep your display and other computer components always switched on. It will help you if because of domain policy your corporation's computers are locked after some time of inactivity.
It's a JavaScript, so you can view or edit it in Windows Notepad or launch it with Windows host, how it's shown on the screenshot below. The script will work until you'll restart a computer or stop the script by ending the process wscript.exe in Windows Task Manager, how it's shown on another screenshot below.

The last version is 2.0:

• Download
• Discuss

Image_creator.exe and time2DEPTH.exe are utilities to process memory data of the Image Edition of GRT (Geosteering Resistivity Tool). The first utility makes binning - "rotates" measured sector resistivity values in reference to that moment Gravity ToolFace and creates a time-based LAS file. The second utility transforms a time-based LAS file that was created by the first utility to two depth-based LAS files: for Gamma and for Resistivities.

The last version of Image_creator is 1.1 and the last version of time2DEPTH is 1.1 too:

• Download Image_creator
• Download time2DEPTH
• Discuss

Yours respectfully     Yuri Kaplan