Low oil prices over the past few years have led oil and gas organizations to embrace digital transformation to improve the efficiency and quality of well design. Nowadays, digital transformation and reducing well construction can have significant impact on determining the financial viability of a discovery. Teamwork and the collaboration of numerous experts in different disciplines are required to achieve a properly engineered well design that can be executed with minimal risks. Present-day well planning uses several increasingly obsolete techniques, including maintaining spreadsheets as risk registers, sharing multiple design iterations between disciplines, drilling, and geological concerns, manually replanning to accommodate changes, and people working in "silos"—often from different offices or from home. Along with this, planning software, when installed on a computer, may be difficult to maintain and update with new software releases. Often an expert in one discipline will not have visibility on the work done by other engineers, impeding collaboration. Many linear processes lead not only to increased well planning time but also to suboptimal well design resulting in higher planning and execution costs (Bello et al. 2014). Today, the oil and gas industry lag in the adoption of digital technologies and most of the ones that exist are not used commercially. Often, the reason is that these solutions address only a very small part of the entire well construction workflow. They are not fully matured, have a poor user interface, and require heavy computing power. Operators, on the other hand, are looking for a full-suite solution and they do not have the resources or expertise to connect various digital solutions existing in the market from different vendors. The need of the hour is an integrated solution that is easy to adopt, provides a collaborative work environment, is cloud-based to leverage computing power (Tanaka et al. 2018), and most importantly supports all the major well design workflows. In this paper, we discuss the first commercial application of a digital cloud-based well-planning solution in the Middle East region, which enabled Crescent Petroleum to become the first operator to adopt the system in UAE.
Well construction and planning is a complex process that requires expertise in numerous disciplines and is conventionally performed using multiple stand-alone domain-specific software. The iterative nature of planning needs several reviews, and it is often impractical to analyze multiple scenarios in the stipulated time available to well planners. For instance, a change in trajectory may cause a geologist to update the formation tops, which in turn might lead to further changes in the trajectory. This should also require changing the casing shoe depths, hydraulics design (possibly including BHA, fluids and bits design), top of cement and cement volumes, casing design, kick tolerance, etc. Moreover, these engineering calculations need to be performed using different types of software, which makes them even more cumbersome. For these applications, cloud-based solutions provide a number of distinct advantages over traditional approaches using stand-alone, silo-based on-premise software. A cloud-based solution brings all the domains into a single system and utilizes the powerful computing capabilities of the cloud—which would not be available to a desktop-based solution—to analyze multiple scenarios and automate repetitive tasks. These solutions provide optimized workflows that help planning teams optimize results by giving them access to all the data and science they need in a single, common collaborative system. Cloud-based systems provide a new way to communicate and share information while eliminating multiple data transfers and manual inputs. Vendors can work directly within the system, reducing design iterations and massively simplifying information exchange. Engineers can simulate various scenarios using automated offset-well analysis dashboards to decide the best plan more quickly. This paper discusses the benefits of a cloud-based collaborative well-planning solution as experienced by various operators. In the cases presented in this paper, operator legacy workflows were mapped by interviewing various domain experts and by analyzing existing standards and documents. Numerous stakeholders were consulted to understand each step of the well-design workflow. Following this, any duplicative and time-consuming steps were optimized or removed. Discussions with subject matter experts (SMEs) and management teams helped to understand the desired and potential capabilities to align with the digital vision of each operator's organization. Proof-of-value projects and actual deployments were undertaken, where asset teams were trained and real wells were designed using the recommended workflow of the cloud-native solution.
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