What stages/steps are there in the drilling process (offshore oil)?

You're joking... You got all night??





It's not exactly a simple process. I'll try to condense it into a few salient points.





1) A surface seismic company does an initial seismic survey of underground formations to determine traps that may hold oil.





2) Based on the results, oil company geologists determine where the best place is to drill the first well.





3) A drilling company is hired to place a drilling rig (offshore platform, when it's offshore) at the appropriate location.





4) An exploration well is drilled. This involves a multitude of additional service companies, such as casing operators, cementing operators, downhole measurements analysts, mud engineers, directional drillers and plenty more. Depending on the location and environment, this process may take anywhere between a week and a year. An exploration well may have a depth of anywhere between 1,000 and 30,000 feet, the average being in the range of 10,000 to 15,000 feet.





5) IF oil is found, the well is completed, which involves a whole bunch of other processes, including testing, perforating, running tubing, installing wellhead equipment etc. If oil is NOT found, sayonara baby, the oil company just lost an investment of many millions of dollars.





6) In the case oil was found, reservoir engineers try to evaluate the extent of the reservoir; this usually requires drilling more evaluation wells to determine the extent of the field.





7) The oil field is developed: that is, many more wells are drilled in strategic points of the reservoir and are completed in order to produce the oil.





8) The producing wells are maintained and measured with downhole instruments on a regular basis.





And I have barely scratched the surface of this subject...What stages/steps are there in the drilling process (offshore oil)?
The only thing the first poster missed was the bidding process for the leases.

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