Innovative Geological Interpretation Framework for Real-Time Drilling Operations

Abstract

Abstract Digitalization is rapidly transforming oil and gas industry, particularly in real-time drilling operations. Many years back, manually-drawn wellsite striplogs were mostly used to assist drilling operations. The legacy technique encountered major challenges such as data accessibility, paper-based interpretation preservation and decision-making process delays. The technologies introduced offer significant improvements where processes with digitalization help build reliable systems for wellsite operations to overcome the challenges by providing an innovative solution to monitor drilling on 24/7 basis. The implemented solution is customized based on an in-depth analysis of exploration workflows. It empowers geologists with interactive interpretation features for casing points identification, lithology interpretation and well correlation utilizing visually-rich log templates. Furthermore, a full integration with corporate repositories and map services is established to facilitate access to drilling, geological and petrophysical data. Due to the criticality of exploration drilling operations, computing services are configured using distributed redundant systems architecture to ensure high availability. The implementation significantly minimizes manual data entry of active wells, which enhances data quality in an efficient manner. The integration with corporate databases and key vendor applications provides a centralized hub for all wellsite geological operations and achieves improved correlation results. The utilization of the interactive GIS maps improves well location identification, spatial measurements with offset wells and reports on relevant log data availability to create geologically meaningful correlation charts. The solution enhances the overall performance by providing an efficient and streamlined access to a cutting-edge set of geological interpretation tools from rig-site utilizing satellite communication. This technology enabled the digitization of more than 5000 wells with standardized business rules to build a consolidated database for wellsite daily operations. The introduced single hub that enables access to geological interpretation data allows geologist to generate customized reports to summarize drilling operations to executive management. Advanced data analytics features and dashboards are implemented to reveal unseen patterns of current and historical data. The comprehensive framework offers digital transformation opportunities such as formation tops prediction and drilling cutting images classification. Furthermore, mobility features will be introduced to provide reliable access anytime, anywhere to facilitate faster decision-making process.