Abstract
As we begin a new decade, drilling systems automation has left its primary residence of PowerPoint slides and is now seeing wider adoption. In areas, the industry sees positive return-on-investment for automation technology development; both financially, from reduction in well construction cost, and in helping meet increasingly prominent ESG targets through emissions reduction.
This paper describes a long-term case study covering the introduction of multiple automated monitoring, advisory and control systems into an already highly optimized jack-up in the North Sea. These resulted in adding incremental value, delivering a multitude of operations significantly below AFE, as well creating a trend of increasing performance spanning a full field development campaign.
In addition to quantifying resulting operational cost-out, the paper addresses several points related to challenges of adoption:
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Necessity for un-biased operational needs to drive technology development. The industry is often drawn to high-end solutions to complex problems when in fact there are low-hanging fruits, such as simple business-process-automation for reporting, which are highly desired by end-users.
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The notion that while there is a lot of rigor in technology development processes, there is not enough focus on the critical human element of adoption. Linked to this is the common misconception that automated systems require less training, when in-fact the opposite is true.
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End-user resistance on initial introduction of a black-box system for automated directional drilling. Retroactive software development moves to more grey- or white-box systems, with an associated positive response in user acceptance.
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Critically of interoperability between operator, OFS and OEM systems. How this will become more important as both closed-loop control systems, and linkages to enterprise level systems, proliferate.
This long-term case study definitively demonstrates that automated systems add value. However, due to the human-component, management-of-change must be carefully considered as we scale adoption.
