Abstract
In the new wave of digitization, real-time advisory mode drilling data analytics is both an intermediate step to achieve long term vision of autonomous drilling and an agile response to the need of delivering beyond best in class wells. An operator has constructed an agile program for drilling data analytics to lead the development of analytics solutions, deployment to collect business values, and handover to productization. The product under development is a Real-Time Drilling Advisor (RTDA) Appstore, which is both an R&D template for prototyping and a hosting environment for rapid field trials and early deployments.
The RTDA Appstore consists of a witsml data pipeline, template of drilling data analytics functionalities, modularized computational kernels, machine learning packages for historical data analysis, an in-memory database for both historical and real-time processed data, customized drilling visualization widgets, and an open-source web app deployment framework. A hybrid methodology combining conventional engineering practice, data-driven approaches, novel visualization formats, and physics-based modeling is adopted to develop real-time data analytics solutions. It focuses on three areas: failure detection, performance improvement, and advisory directional drilling. A list of applications and features in the RTDA Appstore includes: interactive offset data map, drilling parameter roadmap, drilling efficiency monitoring, bit/reamer wear prediction, smart torque/drag, payzone tracking, auto slide sheets, sliding KPI, real-time casing wear, real-time BIC benchmarking, etc.
So far, about 30 wells of the company's Deepwater wells and about 150 of the company's unconventional wells were drilled using RTDA applications. RTDA deployments generated time and cost savings through early warnings or bespoke visualization of information for improved decision making. The RTDA Appstore is built in-house and thus provides flexibility and modularization options and heavily focused on the analytics layer. The agile program creates an interactive channel to not only meet business demand, but also to use feedback from operations to steer the digital R&D strategy. As the half open-source nature of this program, the digital capability cultivated through the development and deployment of RTDA will also be cascaded to local wells teams through format of digital training, code repository, and a single portal Appstore.
