Digital Well Construction—A Success Story
Authors: Syed Mohammed Amer Ali , Al Naji Ali 
Published: February 2022

Drilling projects are often challenging and complex, depending on the size of the project. But they also come with an opportunity to implement new innovative technologies to overcome challenges, excel in performance, and achieve higher efficiencies.

With approximately 11 lump sum turnkey (LSTK) rigs operating in a project, an integrated drilling service provider (IDSP) recognized the opportunity to make significant gains in the well-construction process. Operating in four different onshore fields, the well engineering and execution team is challenged by vast amount of data to work with, multidomain teams to manage, and a complex iterative process of planning and execution. In addition, to increase profitability within the LSTK contract, the IDSP team is always challenged to introduce new strategies to maximize efficiency and improve overall drilling performance.

In principle, optimizing both planning and execution phases of the well-construction cycle is essential to achieve a higher level of efficiency and consistency. Traditionally, throughout the design and execution phases of a well, engineers work in silos, split into multidisciplinary teams each focused on their area of expertise. The workflow would normally include constant data exchange, extensive nonlinked engineering analyses, and repetitive tasks. This eventually increases the risk of inconsistencies and reduces the overall efficiency.

To overcome these challenges and excel in performance, focus was turned toward deploying digital drilling solutions. The IDSP team deployed a digital platform that is aimed at connecting well-construction planning and operations workflows together in a loop, providing all the data and related science in one place.

By adopting a digital well-planning solution, the team has reinvented complex and multidisciplinary well-planning processes. The solution enabled automation and collaboration features that helped engineering teams to reduce time spent in data gathering and exchanging, reengineering designs, and creating/updating drilling programs. This ultimately allowed the engineering teams to focus on technical challenges while maintaining planning coherency.

By deploying a digital well-operations solution, the IDSP team successfully digitalized the drilling system on the rig and automated key repetitive tasks of the driller. This included intelligent parameter selection to improve on-bottom rate of penetration (ROP) and mitigate drilling dysfunctions automatically, sending consistent downhole commands to improve downlinking success ratio, and drill a stand to consistently follow drilling procedure and reduce weight-to-weight connection times. With more than 180,000 ft drilled with a digital operations solution in control, more than 1,100 automated prepost connections and around 1,400 automated downhole commands sent, the IDSP achieved an estimated savings of approximately 2 days per well.

In this paper we will further highlight how the new digital drilling technology was deployed and how we created value on the LSTK drilling project by describing the data-driven workflows used during planning and the tools that automated drilling operations during execution.