Abstract
Onshore drilling in China is very diverse, ranging from wells drilled relatively straightforward in a matter of days to more complex geological environments where drilling can take several hundred days. Recently, this market has increasingly opened up to international operators and service companies, presenting opportunities to introduce new approaches to drilling performance optimization. To best capture the performance potential in any given application it is necessary to gain a detailed understanding of the complex drilling and production environment. This requires an understanding of many important variables, including:
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Macro components—Operators, geographic locations, organizational structure, decision makers, drilling activity, achievable market penetration.
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External factors—Technology vendors, products, service organization, market strategies, organizational strengths and weaknesses
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Drilling applications—Application breakdown, drilling issues, best practices and opportunities
This enables an organization to optimize its technology and service portfolio in a holistic approach to develop system solutions that achieve its objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs), and assist operating companies to overcome drilling challenges, deliver reductions in non-productive time (NPT) and invisible lost time (ILT), and improve overall performance.
This paper demonstrates how one organization in China used a proven Knowledge Management process and award-winning KM software to build a knowledge base of expertise in the main onshore China oilfields. The authors will detail the process of knowledge extraction and the methods used to document this experiential knowledge, allowing its communication and collaborative re-use in Communities of Practice across the organization. As a first step in a long-term strategy, the authors will demonstrate through two case-studies how this knowledgebase has been re-used delivering savings to an international operator with a 25% reduction in drill bit consumption. Furthermore, the knowledge base was applied for a domestic operator, realizing drilling time of 38 days less than planned, eliminating unnecessary trips and increasing the overall percentage of productive on- bottom drilling time.
