Abstract
Historically the industry has siloed each part of the drilling process—workflow, hardware, and crew—limiting the impact of innovative technologies introduction. This paper describes the results from the introduction of a new drilling system, built from the ground up to achieve a step change in efficiency and consistency. It uses a holistic and disruptive approach, based on a full-system analysis of the drilling process. The systemic approach allows to fully harvest the value brought by software and hardware platforms and downhole technologies through a new organizational structure and processes.
The approach first focused on the Permian basin, analyzing over 4,000 steps to drill a typical well, cutting across all technical and operational disciplines and mapping them into more than 200 multi-disciplinary workflows. While connecting these workflows, opportunities were found to change activities, remove unnecessary steps and resources, and align job scopes to the tasks instead of using the usual service providers perspective.
The system was tailored to meet the specific demands of the operating market. The digital platform seamlessly orchestrates new workflows, shares and links data across multiple domains and technologies, drives intelligent automation and combines surface and subsurface data for insight analysis. The hardware platform integrates the surface systems (MPD, casing running, cementing), the downhole tools and the digital platform. The workflow-driven organization accounts for the new system capabilities. It includes an integrated crew, centralized process management, remotely executed operations and technical support. This system has drilled several wells and has successfully tested all these components.
