IT Infrastructure Architectures to Support Drilling Automation

Abstract

Drilling automation is gaining momentum as seen by the increasing participation at workshops. Most of the early efforts of drilling automation have focused on incorporating specialized algorithms by both oil companies and service companies that try to improve the drilling performance. As drilling automation efforts try to scale to all rig types and all drilling operations there will be an increasing need to integrate and connect equipment from different vendors with different control systems to create complete automated work flow. Implementing drilling automation on existing rigs requires integration of equipment owned by the drilling contractor, service company and even the operator. This paper will investigate different architectures that have been successfully used in other domains to solve this key technology challenge to support Automation on a drilling rig. Cloud computing has been used as a way to provision services on demand. There are several public cloud services that are available via the internet. The focus of this paper will be the implementation of a community cloud infrastructure that can be implemented on a drilling rig, provisioning various services key to the successful implementation of drilling automation. IntroductionThe focus of this paper will be on land rigs where there has been more efforts to advance drilling automation in recent years. Traditionally Land rigs have not seen much effort on automation due to the emphasis on low cost drilling. Availability of local crew and the lower cost of managing crews on land has not been conducive to investments in automation. Most of the rigs build in the past have been generic rigs with a mast, sub-structure, drawworks, rotary table, pumps, fluid management and even a topdrive was an addon. All additional technology required to drill wells were added via service companies. Most service companies bring in enough equipment to be self sufficient and do not rely on the rig equipment. This philosophy has forced each service company to add an independent rig network, satellite connection, additional displays on the rig floor. The landscape has been slowly changing to where more sophisticated wells are being drilled, often in remote areas, requiring more of the services as standard packages with an increased emphasis on safety and reduction of personnel on the rig floor. Most of the land rigs being built today are PLC controlled rigs with integrated drawworks, topdrive and pumps. The ability for the service companies and operators to tie into these automated rigs and create automated workflows is there, but there are many challenges to making this happen including lack of interface standards and viable IT infrastructures. As we try to understand how to integrate equipment control systems from different service companies, there has been a need to look at how IT infrastructure solutions from the general IT industry can help bridge some of these gaps. Before we look at how IT infrastructure can help solve some these challenges, we need to look at the differen...

Drilling Systems Automation: Current State, Initiatives and Potential Impact

“…Communications in these layers are a mix of deterministic and non-deterministic protocols, with frequencies typically less than 20 Hz that dispatch commands and data while drilling. At the application and remote levels (Annaiyappa 2013), timing is even more relaxed and communication protocols such as the wellsite information transfer standard markup language (WITSML) predominate.…”

Drilling-Systems Automation: Current State, Initiatives, and Potential Impact

“…Communications in these layers are a mix of deterministic and nondeterministic protocols, with frequencies typically less than 20 Hz that dispatch commands and data while drilling. At the application and remote levels (Annaiyappa 2013), timing is even more relaxed, and communications protocols such as the wellsite information transfer standard markup language (WITSML) predominate. WITSML is an open, nonproprietary standard for data transmission, with protocols that are nondeterministic and typically not used in control systems.…”

Autonomous Decision-Making While Drilling

“…With the advent of several drilling automation solutions that require access to the drilling control system (DCS), open interfaces have been developed [11] and new software architectures for the DCS have been designed [12].…”