Technology — 18.08.2026 — East West Drilling engineering team
A vertical well has the simplest geometry, but simplicity does not always mean the lowest cost. If a reservoir is spread across several structures at the surface, each target normally needs its own pad, its own access road and its own equipment mobilisation. Directional drilling lets several targets be reached from a single surface location, cutting the number of pads and sharing infrastructure costs across them.
The second factor is reservoir coverage. When a formation cannot be efficiently reached by a vertical well — say it extends laterally, or an obstacle such as a settlement or a body of water sits above it — steering the trajectory allows the same target to be reached from a different angle. That brings a larger share of the reservoir into production without acquiring extra surface area.
The third, and often overlooked, factor is non-productive time (NPT). The more precise the trajectory plan, the less need there is for unplanned correction while drilling. Real-time MWD/LWD data lets the actual path be compared against the plan and small deviations corrected before they become a problem — which reduces repeat drilling and downtime.
In the end, the value of directional drilling is not simply "drilling fewer wells" — it is extracting more economic value from every metre drilled. East West Drilling has worked on this principle since 2008, building directional drilling experience across more than 300 wells in varied geological conditions in Azerbaijan, Turkey and Kazakhstan.
