The personas of engineers and geoscientists are often very different. And when it comes to corporate risk assessment and reward systems, company incentives for these individuals can be counterproductive to meeting corporate objectives such as attaining the highest IP in a play and achieving superior well performance in comparison with their peer group and competitors. For example, drilling team metrics and Service Company personnel objectives may be polar-opposite to Geology's goal to attain pinpoint formation zone landings and then maintaining geologic target objectives to TD (i.e. landing and staying in zone). Consequently, asset team members often miss corporate goals for achieving the best possible results from their investment due to conflicts or unrecognized trade-offs required between departmental domains.
Sometimes competing, divergent drivers, and inherent personality differences within the asset team, and other well-operations participants, can create obvious conflict and ultimately result in a dysfunctional group. The outcome can be a breakdown of the team due to many factors including individual incentives, personalities or very simply, personal motivation. The ultimate outcome may be significant conflict between otherwise closely aligned asset team members and service company participants.
The following article will explore how to overcome these challenges and will highlight some simple concepts that will help engineers and geoscientists achieve the company's ultimate goals together. Understanding some basic drilling (engineering) and geosteering (geological) principles and trade-offs will be featured with some recommended best practices for drilling the "perfect horizontal well'.
