Abstract
A rigorous initiative was undertaken in Brazil 3 years back to identify invisible lost time with the objective to improve safety and performance of the pre-salt drilling program.
This was only possible by combining the following:
Rigorous drilling data quality assurance and recording.
Use of automation to correctly identify the rig state using a proven known product.
Using an appropriate commercial algorithms and web reporting systems to clearly help analyze the results on both safety and invisible lost time.
Building a team of performance engineers to analyze and work with the contractor to help identify areas of safety and performance improvement – the data shows that these two items go hand in hand. A safe crew works consistently well that directly affects performance.
Constant re-training and interacting with contractors to ensure that they get to see and understand the variability in their routine operations and perform route cause analysis with the aid of the automation tool.
Among many of the examples presented in the paper will be one on weight to weight connection time of an entire fleet of rigs (23 rigs) that reduced in 19% from 2012 to 2014 through the elimination of unnecessary reaming (that wasn't clearly measured before this effort). Also the variability among contractors is 50% in a wellbore conditioning time per connection that is a huge difference when comparing how similar these operations really were. The paper will also present actual total savings considering several KPIs of about 350 offshore rig days that translates in more than ¼ of a billion dollars.
The conclusion is that a lot can be saved by combining automation, processes, and management commitment at the appropriate mix level – just throwing money at problems isn't necessarily the solution.
