How to Accelerate Drilling Learning Curves

Abstract

Given the current economic climate and continued volatility in oil and natural gas prices, extracting maximum benefit from drilling performance optimization is key to the economical exploitation of many resource plays around the world. Shell Upstream Americas is employing a highly effective performance improvement team to help drive performance optimization and the delivery of top quartile performance on its wells in North America and beyond. Central to this group is a dedicated team of optimization engineers that deliver drilling efficiency optimization techniques, the innovative use of real-time optimization centers, and value-adding root-cause failure investigations to various land and offshore well delivery teams in a fit-for-purpose way. Using the optimization approaches taken, it has been possible to help accelerate well delivery times and associated learning curves by as much as a factor of three, often in a minimum amount of time. A main conclusion is therefore that this approach is a highly effective way to bring performance optimization focus to field operations. This paper highlights the modus operandi of these optimization engineers, the techniques and tools they employ, and the remarkable results achieved. The workflow and organizational structure was applied to well delivery optimization with projects ranging from shale gas drilling in the Continental US and Canada as well as hard rock drilling in the Middle East. IntroductionA perception may exist in the oil and gas industry, and among its many stakeholders, that large multi-national oil and gas companies struggle to compete with smaller national or independent companies due to their size and associated overhead, bureaucracy, adherence to global standards, etc. (Sneider 1993, Morel 2002. Direct costs for multi-national companies may indeed in some cases be higher due to differences in well construction standards and the associated assurance risks that are deemed acceptable, and a higher need for on-site supervision particularly in the area of occupational safety. A high-level generalization about "slow and expensive" multi-nationals, however, often fails to recognize some key strengths that larger multi-national companies can bring to the table to make them more competitive. These include the ability to develop (or, with partners, co-develop) important performance improvement technologies and having the in-house resources to mature those technologies and quickly capitalize on them in the field. Any higher upfront costs may then be offset by superior well delivery performance, and in particular by improvements in well delivery time. This theme is explored in the present paper, where we show how technologies for drilling efficiency were successfully deployed in the onshore gas plays of the United States and Canada, thereby accelerating learning curves and making well delivery operations in these areas highly competitive. Moreover, the learnings from these operations were quickly carried over to other areas, most notably hard rock drilling operations ...

An Early Warning System for Identifying Drilling Problems: An Example From a Problematic Drill-Out Cement Operation in the North-Sea

“…This particular method has recently been automated by direct access to real-time rig sensors and running commercial torque and drag software (Niedermayr, 2010). Other approaches have been investigated that are not centered on physical models of the drilling process but instead focused upon recognizing similar situations which could led to drilling incidents (Van Oort, 2011), ( Shokouhi, 2009). Efforts have also been made to take advantage of the large quantity of real-time data available at the rig site to go further than just a mechanical friction analysis.…”