Iran drills 7 smart oil wells

Managing-Director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) Ahmad Qalebani announced that the country's engineers have managed to drill 7 smart oil wells for the first time in Iran. "It is the first time that smart wells are drilled in Iran," Qalebani said on Sunday. "Three of the drilled wells have two branches and four of the drilled wells have one branch using the state-of-the-art smart technologies," he added. Smart wells refer to wells completed with valves or chokes downhole in the reservoir and with equipment which can be operated from the surface. Also in 2012 Iran succeeded in manufacturing a smart Pipeline Inspection Gauge (PIG), breaking the industrial monopoly of Russia and the US in this field. The first Iran-made smart PIG system was used along the 110-kilometer Neyzar-Arak gas pipeline. Iran had to spend a huge amount of money for purchasing PIG systems from abroad because only the US and Russia had access to such technology. Smart Pigs are inspection devices that record information about the internal conditions of a pipeline. They are inserted into the pipeline and are pushed along by the flowing product. They may measure several different things from inside of the pipeline, including restrictions and deformations of the pipe, as well as metal loss.