Light Modular Rig for Minimal Environmental Impact
Authors: Mehra Sachin , Abedrabbo Azzam 
Published: December 2007

The first plenary meeting of United Nations on human Environment in 1972 considered the need for a common outlook and for common principles to inspire and guide the people and industries of the world in the preservation and enhancement of human environment. Since then many countries have, or are now enacting, environmental legislation's covering the wide spectrum of environmental protection issues. Petroleum industry has not been immune to such scrutiny, however, little has changed in land based drilling operations, especially in remote areas.

A major aspect of the ongoing program in the design of a light modular land rig has been minimisation of the environmental impact. Today, concerns for protection of the environment have spread in many drilling areas: the use of some traditional drilling techniques such as waste pits is now banned. When re-thinking about rig hardware and design today, environment protection needs to be considered at an early stage.

There are many incentives for implementation of environmental protection programs, in design and in operation, aside from the regulatory/compliance issue. Waste disposal costs have risen dramatically over the last few years and the trend is expected to continue. Improvements in environment conditions improves morale and image. Growing public awareness and realisation of the man made harm in many regions of the earth: dangerous levels of pollution in water, air, earth and living beings; major and undesirable disturbances to the ecological balance of the biosphere; destruction and depletion of irreplaceable resources; and gross deficiencies harmful to the physical, mental and social health of man, in the living and working environment.

This paper discusses the steps taken, early on in the design stage and operations methodology, to minimise the environmental impact. These include, but not limited to:–Minimum "footprint" and civil works–"Dry Location" concept with no requirement of waste pits.–Improvements in waste fluids channelling, collection and recycling.–Minimised personnel exposure to hazardous chemicals. - Waste minimisation, segregation and disposal.–Noise reduction.–Education and awareness programs.

Introduction

Across the industry ways are being sought to extract oil and gas more cost effectively while improving occupational health, safety and environmental performance. Little fundamental questioning of how the drilling process is organised, has been done over the past fifty years. Today, the ever increasing need for more cost-effective operations is bringing new approaches to the fore.

Thus a project, Simpler, which defines a new rig site organisation and designs a light modular rig around it, was initiated to create a fully integrated rig team and improve HSE and operational performance by the application of cost effective technology. Coming with a new rig design in today's competitive market is a challenge, which requires an overall approach. In the case of this project two elements supported innovation to make it cost effective:–The big picture approach, looking not only at the new rig hardware costs but offsetting it by savings resulting from the new rig organisation–Wide use of existing state of the art technologies (from oilfield and non-oilfield industries) rather than developing new hardware. Integrating these new technologies at an early stage of the design rather than retrofitting them on an existing rig enables us to take full advantage of them.

Drilling operations involves many types of Hazardous and non-hazardous waste. Typically, most of the emphasis in today's business is on "end-of-pipe" treatment.

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