Greenstick Well Engineering: Sustainability Index for Asset Value Chain Management

Abstract

Environmental impacts due to exploration to the abandonment of oil and gas wells are a major focus when the wells are planned and drilled. However, there is no industry standard to quantify the impact due to complex indicators and associated variables. So, it is necessary to have an assessment framework and a methodology with the help of the digital transformation that provides an integrative index. This index allows a baseline to estimate the benchmarking for the well engineering not only during planning but also in real-time as the well is drilled and produced. This paper presents and validates a new model for the sustainability index for well design and engineering in the life cycle of the well. This proposed method avoids some of the vagueness of well’s sustainability and can be used and applied practically. It is based on various metrics and weightage assigned when a well is planned, designed, and engineered. Evaluating the index for well engineering is based on the following elements: environmental impact, well design and engineering, functionality and optimization impact, impact of well and maintenance costs, health and safety impact, societal impact. Each element contains sub-elements. This process involves individual indexing through backpropagation of neural networks combined with bat algorithm to obtain the final overall index.