Step Change Transformation of Legacy Rigs to Autonomous Drilling Rigs

Abstract

During the past decade, drilling automation systems have been an attractive target for a lot of operating and drilling companies. Despite progress in automation in various industries, like mining and downstream, the drilling industry has lagged far behind in the real application of autonomous technologies implementation. This can be attributed to harsh environment, high level of uncertainty in input data, and that majority of stock is legacy drilling rigs, resulting in capital intensive implementations. In the past years there have been several attempts to create fully automated rigs, that includes surface automation and drilling automation. Such solutions are very attractive, because they allow people to move out of hazardous zones and, at the same time, improve performance. However, the main deficiency of such an approach is the very high capital investment required for development of highly bespoke rigs (Slagmulder 2016). And in the current business environment, with high volatility in oil and gas prices, plus the huge negative effect of the Covid-19 crisis on the world's economic situation, it would be hard to imagine that there are a lot of companies willing to make such a risky investment. In addition to this, due to the lack of demand, the market is full of relatively new, high-performance rigs. Taking all these into account, the obvious question is whether it makes sense to invest money and time into the development of drilling automation. The answer should be yes, for three substantial reasons:Automation improves personal safety, by moving people out of danger zones;Automation improves process safety, by transferring execution from person to machine, which reduces the risk of human error;Automation improves efficiency by bringing consistency to drilling and through the use of self-learning algorithms, which allow machines to drill each successive well better than the previous. This paper will not look into surface automation, such as pipe-handling, chemical and mud handling on site. The paper is focused on the subsurface, namely on the drilling automation process, the challenges that need to be overcome to deploy a vendor agnostic system on a majority of existing rigs. A vendor agnostic system is a modification of an operator's autonomous drilling system (Rassenfoss 2011), designed to use existing rigs, BHAs, and have minimum footprint on the rigs for operational use. A vendor agnostic system will increase adoption of automated technologies and further drive improvements in operational and business performance