Drilling Operations, Deep Sea Drilling Project

This paper was prepared for the 40th Annual California Regional Meeting of the Society of Petroleum Engineers of AIME, to be held in San Francisco, Calif., Nov. 6–7, 1969. Permission to copy is restricted to an abstract of not more than 300 words. Illustrations may not be copied. The abstract should contain conspicuous acknowledgment of where and by whom the paper is presented. Publication elsewhere after publication in the JOURNAL OF PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY or the SOCIETY OF publication in the JOURNAL OF PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY or the SOCIETY OF PETROLEUM ENGINEERS JOURNAL is usually granted upon request to the Editor PETROLEUM ENGINEERS JOURNAL is usually granted upon request to the Editor of the appropriate journal provided agreement to give proper credit is made. Discussion of this paper is invited. Three copies of any discussion should be sent to the Society of Petroleum Engineers office. Such discussion may be presented at the above meeting and, with the paper, may be considered for publication in one of the two SPE magazines. The Deep Sea Drilling project is funded by the National Science Foundation for 12.6 million dollars for a period of 18 months to carry out a deep-earth sampling program. Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California is the prime contractor and operator for the project. The project's scientific objectives are to provide new knowledge of the ocean basins, provide new knowledge of the ocean basins, their history and record of changing climate and evolving life for many millions of years. Physical evidence substantiating two Physical evidence substantiating two principal geological hypothesis (sea floor, principal geological hypothesis (sea floor, spreading and continental drift) has been recovered. The operational objective is to penetrate all sediments, recover samples of penetrate all sediments, recover samples of these sediments, make a shallow penetration of the basement and recover samples of the basement. Drilling operations in the deep ocean basin are being conducted from the Glomar Challenger to obtain core samples of the sediment and basement in water depths to 20,000'. This paper will summarize the results obtained and paper will summarize the results obtained and the drilling techniques used on the first six legs of the program. The summary includes discussions on the drill ship, dynamic positioning, drilling equipment, drill string, positioning, drilling equipment, drill string, coring equipment, techniques used to obtain the cores, electric logging and the results obtained on the first six legs of this project.