Redefining Operations Reporting Codes to Support Digitalization of Well Operations

Abstract

Abstract Under increasingly volatile market conditions, operators face pressure to increase performance and reduce costs through standardization of engineering, operations, services and equipment. To this effect, an operator has redefined the way it reports onsite operations through the development of a standardized set of reporting activity codes, designed as the backbone of a standardized and digital well design and execution process. The operator recognizes the value of industry wide standardization of fit-for-purpose operations codes and offers to donate the codes to the Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) project. Reporting of well activities with free text descriptions and classifications in 15-minute intervals is a common practice in well operations. The reports have traditionally informed a variety of stakeholders on operations. With a rise of analytics tools and increasingly interconnected digital systems, operators now potentially have millions of hours of classified activity data at their fingertips, with an enormous potential to improve planning and predictability of new operations. With an increased use of data comes an awareness of poor data quality that eliminates performance gains from the data collection efforts. This work describes new concepts that helped to redefine the well activity reporting code set. An interdisciplinary team worked on defining a new operations code set for the requirements of digitized operations reporting and analysis as well as facilitating industry wide data exchange. The new codes were defined based on desired outcomes for data quality, performance analysis, automated key performance indicators (KPIs), insights from manual offset analysis, interdisciplinary interfaces and integrations with a digital well design process. In addition to breakdown of time spent on specific operations, the concepts focus on measuring performance of planned activities only. Thousands of combinations of these codes were redefined drawing on historic examples and engineering expertise from a set of activities across all types of well operations. The effort yielded significant improvements in data quality during reporting through simplification of the coding system and assigning codes to operations in the planning stages of the well construction process to enable the rig team to report actual operations against the plan. Good data quality and well-defined codes in turn enabled calculating KPIs automatically from the data. The standardized operations code set presents a novel way of defining operations codes for requirements beyond reporting, but with digitalization, automation and well design in mind. In addition, the operator offers to donate the set to the industry to lay the foundation for an open-source environment that enables digital technologies to flourish. A copy of the full code set is attached to the publication of this paper.