Development and Application of Digital Solutions for Automatic Hazard Identification During Well Planning Stage

Abstract

Having a good understanding of the offset wells is the key for successful planning and execution of any well, both from the risk management point of view as well as from equipment and operations planning. In both cases of congested or simple fields the amount of the manual work is significant, which further affected by potential human mistakes. The manuscript aims to provide the detailed explanation of the digitalization of the offset well risk analysis (ORA) implemented in several drilling projected, what lead to almost complete elimination of the manual work and allowed to improve the quality and the quantity of the offset data. At the project kick-off the manual work performed by different parties (drilling engineer as well as drilling fluid, directional, bits engineers etc.) was mapped in the different detailed workflows. This allowed to understand the final result of every tasks. As next step the massive database of the end of well reports, post-job reports, daily drilling reports, etc was created with few tens of millions entry points. Further the artificial intelligence in combination with data analytics was used to replicate the previously mapped workflows. As the result entire manual work was replaced by the digital, leading to receive higher number of outputs with superior quality. The direct benefit was a reduction of the time required to get the final result, when previously a detailed analysis was completed in 3 to 4 days, and now it is done within minutes, allowing to dedicate the man-hours to more other valuable tasks. The manuscript provides the novel information on ability to use digital technologies to eliminate manual work and avoid costly human mistakes. The proposed solution can be implemented in any other drilling project worldwide, as well as in any other activity requiring performance of the repetitive tasks.