Toward the Redefinition of Drilling Plan and Execution Via a Digital Drilling Ecosystem

Abstract

Abstract For the past few years, the oil and gas industry has invested in digitalization efforts for well construction and drilling operations with the goal of improving drilling efficiency, e.g. optimizing the time and costs of reaching drilling targets. It is widely recognized that this can be achieved by creating a standardized and structured wellbore planning and execution ecosystem. Today this is still missing; each step of the drilling activity planning is performed in separate spreadsheets and documents, and legacy applications that require point-to-point connections, frequent data importing and exporting, and manual typing and retyping. These inefficiencies make it difficult to standardize ways of working, accurately communicate the drilling activity plans to all stakeholders and partners involved in the value chain, and reuse data to improve the planning process. This paper describes the approach taken by one of the largest independent oil and gas operators in Europe toward an open, standardized, and structured digital drilling ecosystem that orchestrates the exchange of plans between systems while enforcing standardized plan structures from well construction, time estimation, and the time planner to the rig action plan and its connection to a rig control system. Central to this ecosystem is a "smart hub" that receives and centrally masters updated plans, checks each plan's conformance to the schema on which it is based, and distributes each committed plan to registered consumers. The smart hub provides a loose coupling between itself and connected plan consumers and publishers, which enables the easy connection of new systems or the replacement of one system with another. The operator described in this paper is deploying this smart hub to act as its single source of truth for activity planning data and to orchestrate the exchange of this data throughout the planning and execution phases. So far, this approach has elevated the collaboration within the organization and with stakeholders. The longer-term goal of the approach is to inspire the development of new software applications and eliminate old bottlenecks related to manual typing and iteration, thereby improving the user experience and defining new standards for better drilling efficiency. By leveraging the connection of automated drilling to the digital drilling ecosystem, the operator believes a reduction in drilling time of 15-25% can be achieved. This will create substantial cost savings and thus allow smaller reservoirs to be more profitable. Other benefits include more accurate time estimates and resource planning, more efficient logistical services, and better data-driven decision-making.