A Practical Approach to Evaluating Drilling Projects

Abstract

In the past estimating drilling performance or project performance for well engineering projects has been carried out in a combination of ways such as accounting for time based events that eventually result in costs or financial relationships. It is rather unfortunate, but the requirement within the industry still remains the quantification of projects and project costs as a function of cost or financial exposure. In most cases the situation is one of which inherent peculiarities within the project, though not man-made, are somewhat relegated to the background during project evaluation. Frequently this is due to the inability of project teams to quantify the parameters required to adequately establish key contributory factors responsible for overall project performance. In this paper I have tried to postulate a rather straight-forward method of establishing performance metrics without so much as deriving complex equations an engineer may find highly impossible or cumbersome to fully regularize to provide any meaningful relationship from one well to the other. The relationship model developed tries to relate both operational and financial efficiencies as a project/well specific performance factor referred to as TPI, i.e. the "Technical Performance Index". The TPI is specific to each well and a regional average provides an indication for overall performance. This paper does not consider completion operations or any operation related to well testing or workover operations at this moment but focuses primarilly on dry-hole operations up until the well is programmed for completions. Relationship ModelsSeveral parameters need to be qualified to be able to fully establish project performance metrics. As with every "practical" approach to representing/presenting data, the solution proferred must be in a useful and useable format, must be able to represent information in a comparative manner while maintaining objectivity from well to well and it needs to be a finite value, i.e. number that makes sense. Our approach will be similar to the concept proposed by Nkwocha 1 where he established directional drilling performance evaluation as a value between 0 and 1. Therefore the model for evaluating drilling events will need to follow the same format with contributions from technical and financial based workflow considerations. The contributory techno-financial based model looks at the ability of the equipment, personnel and tooling to adequately deliver the well objectives. The financial model on the other hand eliminates statistical models as these can be cumbersome and difficult to implement and interpret especially in the short term. However in the long-term statistical models become prevalent and obvious where a system of continuous improvement has been implemented as the only real basis for having statistical models in the first place. However, in this paper the actual financial exposure of each operation is quantified and is used as an input in the performance model. Why Do We Need A New Relationship Model?The drilling ind...