Horizontal drilling and gravel packing in deep and ultradeep water

The full-length paper discusses specialized completion tools and techniques developed while drilling and completing openhole sections of 20 horizontal gravel-packed wells and three Level 5 multilateral wells in the Marlim field offshore Brazil. Openhole horizontal wells are attractive in ultradeep water because this completion eliminates a liner and allows a larger casing string at the reservoir. When openhole completions are combined with multilateral completions, significantly fewer wells are required to drain the reservoir.