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 S multilateral wells in the Marlim fie ld offshore Brazil. Openhole horizontal wells are attractive in ultradeep w ater because this completion eliminates a liner and allows a larger casing string at the reservoir. When openhole completions are combined with multil ateral completions, significantly fewer wells are required to drain the res ervoir.