Automation, Robotics Transforming How Industry Drills Wells
Authors: Pallanich Jennifer 
Published: November 2024

Automation, which can generate significant returns on investment, is increasingly mainstream, while robotics, which can improve safety on the jobsite, is gaining traction more slowly.

Both play a role in safely finding and producing oil and gas, but neither would be able to shine without advances in technology. And while some worry automation will take jobs away—US dockworkers struck briefly in early October partly due to such fears—experts say the intent is to aid humans in their jobs and free them up for other, more meaningful tasks.

Milos Milosevic, senior director of digital well construction at Halliburton, told JPT implementing automation and robotics generates a number of benefits, including resource optimization, operation transparency, and consistency.

“As soon as you introduce automation, as soon as you introduce robotics, what you get is consistency, and what you get is transparency, because now we are putting all the knowledge in people’s heads in an automated system which executes every time the same,” he said, adding that leads to faster time to first oil, fewer emissions, and reduced hazards on the jobsite.

“We want to have operations where we can be confident that every time, it’s going to go as we plan, and that the automation is going to help us deal with unexpected things that will happen in any kind of execution,” Milosevic said. “All of that creates value.”

While uptake of automated processes is increasing, he noted many opportunities for further development remain. Beyond the benefit of using automation to remove people from having to perform routine operations, automation can produce outcomes that are very difficult for people to achieve, he said, such as integrating massive amounts of data and acting on that information. Knowledge can be distilled into software, which can then be trained to follow rules so the software recognizes when something is happening faster than a human can.

He cited well construction activities as an example. “You don’t want to get stuck; you don’t want to have a well control event.”

Typically, a person would watch a model, evaluate how a well was shaping up, and take action if data indicates irregularities or potential issues with the well. “That knowledge and that decision-making is distilled now into software,” Milosevic said.

The goal is to aid experts by providing tools that allow them to spend their attention on important things.

“They’re getting the alerts. They’re getting automated recommendations of what to do. In certain cases, the automation takes over and does certain responses that the driller, for example, would acknowledge and see that this happened without the necessary intervention from a human. So, we are augmenting, really, what the person does,” he said.

The result is that the software can “worry” about the safety of equipment, such as by alerting people to emerging issues in order to prevent unsafe operations of machines and let the software focus on when actions are taken, instead requiring the people to do so. Milosevic said such software “orchestrates higher levels of working. When do we do certain things? When do we turn on certain pressure zones? When do you drill harder or not?”