The Best is Yet to Come

The following is told by an American lady:

“My grandmother always used to tell us, “keep your forks.” when the main dishes were being cleared from the table. It was my favorite part of dinner, because I knew that something wonderful was coming… like a velvety chocolate cake or a deep-dish apple pie.”

A similar expression would be “You have not seen anything yet.” or as my 8-year old daughter told me, “I am not done yet!” when I gave her an applause after she sang the song from the movie “Frozen”.

Life is a simple and normal routine. Everyone has the same number of hours in a day and the same number of days in a year. It is up to us to make our daily routines more interesting, to fill our time doing things that will make us grow in every aspect of our lives, to make the most of our time. We cherish the hope that our present situation is not our final destination. The best is yet to come.

For us software developers, we are continuously enhancing the drilling software that is being developed. We certainly can’t add more hours to our day, but we can make our development more efficient. We will probably spend the same amount of time as we did last year, but we will have better products in 2014.

The latest release of our cementing software CEMPRO+ is a milestone. Why? Because this is the first time we address the displacement efficiency during the multi-fluid displacement operations such as cementing or wellbore cleanup. Before CEMPRO+ we used to assume that the drilling mud was completely displaced by the cement slurry with the use of a piston. This convenient assumption makes the hydraulics relatively easy, but it fails to predict the mud channeling which occurs due to many factors such as, differences in the cement properties and mud flow rates, and the casing centralization. A typical illustration of mud channeling is shown here:

Mud channel left on the narrow side of the annulus

Mud channel left on the narrow side of the annulus (Macondo incident-Chief Counsel’s report, 2011)

CEMPRO+ can help predict the mud fractions in the annulus during a cementing job. The following picture is a snap shot from the program. It looks neat. Graphics are more significant, because they show what really happens in the wide and narrow sides of the annulus.

Displacement Efficiency Illustration in CEMPRO+

Displacement Efficiency Illustration in CEMPRO+

If our CEMPRO has been on your software menu, keep your forks, because the best is yet to come.