TEHRAN- Iran’s Drilling Company International (DCI) managed to redesign and upgrade the DCI-1 drilling control and protection system by the company's experts, the managing director announced.

Hamidreza Saqafi told Shana that the Rack Phase Difference (RPD) protection and control system to compensate for the weakness in the control and protection system of the drilling rigs was redesigned and upgraded by the company’s experts for the first time in Iran. The system has been installed on the DCI-1 offshore rig and has been tested.

He continued: "The RPD control system allows offshore drilling rigs to have proper control over the forces applied to each side of the rig bases and significantly prevents damage to the bases."

Following the country’s approach of achieving self-reliance as the main strategy to nullify the U.S. sanctions, the Iranian Oil Ministry’s all subsidiaries including the National Iranian Drilling Company (NIDC) and its affiliated companies have been seriously pursuing the objective of indigenizing technology for production as well as services.

As previously announced by the head of NIDC’s Technology and Engineering Department, the company has indigenized the knowledge for manufacturing 6,000 drilling equipment in collaboration with domestic manufacturers and engineers in the previous Iranian calendar year (ended on March 19).

According to Behnoud Mansournejad, before this success, the technology for manufacturing the mentioned equipment was in the possession of a handful of foreign companies.

Among this equipment, the parts related to the rotary Blow out Preventers (BOP) used in air drilling operations have been tested in operation and approved by the operational units for optimal performance.

Mansournejad said that the use of the domestically-made parts and equipment saved the country 45 billion rials (about $107 million) in the previous year.

For the current year, a list of basic equipment needs of the country have been identified in collaboration with NIDC’s operational and support departments to be indigenized by local companies and knowledge-based firms for the first time, he added.

Earlier in 2019, Mansournejad had announced that almost 80 percent of the oil and gas industry's drilling equipment needs have been indigenized by NIDC in the past decade.

According to the official, the equipment indigenized by NIDC includes drilling mud pumps, blowout preventers, traction motors, draw-works, drilling fluid recycling systems, mission centrifugal pumps, top drives, and drilling rig slow circulation rate pressure systems.

MA/MA