Application of Operational Excellence Concepts in Drilling Operations Through Embedding Learning from Incidents to Enhance Efficiency & Performance to Prevent Well Control Incidents
Authors: Tayab Muhammad , Salama Mena , Ivanov Anatoly 
Published: October 2022

Oil & Gas operations place a high focus on the prevention of incidents to avoid interruptions to operations, safety of staff and stakeholders, and safeguard their reputation. Incidents and high potential near miss events are investigated mainly to identify the causes triggering the accident and to identify corrective actions to prevent such accidents to reoccur. The repetition of similar incidents is indicative of gaps in incident investigation process to identify root causes and effective implementation of recommendations. Often well control incidents are investigated as a single incident, missing overall interactions between organizational behaviours over an extended period. An extended analysis of Twenty-five (25) well control incidents within Upstream Oil & Gas companies was conducted to assess repetition of causes and regrouping of causes to assess linkage with well control barrier analysis. ADNOC has a matured HSE management system supported by HSE & operation standards and dedicated framework for competency assurance, well barriers, incident management and process safety supporting ADNOC Upstream Group Companies (GC) to control and prevent well control incidents. Mainly due to the effectiveness of management frameworks for incident management, Operations excellence, process safety and well barriers, ADNOC has not experience any blowout event over the last 10 years during drilling or well interventions. A review of well control incidents and interviews with professionals including drilling engineers, sub surface specialists, drilling supervisors, contractors and consultants indicated the following areas for development:

Inadequate identification/correction of worksite/job hazards, particularly in connection with changes to plans Inadequate competency, gaps in communication and change management Gaps in drilling programmes and uncertainty in predicting reservoir conditions resulted in insufficient margin between pore and cracking pressures Encountering unexpected shallow gas pockets Inadequacy in risk assessments followed by gaps in competence (training and/or experience) of assigned staff/crew and communication are the most recurring underlying causes.

Based on the findings, review and analysis of investigation the following are the key recommendations to address/prevent well control events:

Enhance training efforts for personnel (staff & rig crew) involved in well control situations Conduct awareness sessions on risk management and operational risk during drilling and well intervention Enhance inspection of measures adopted for verification of well barriers, in all operations Adopt measures to build competence and share experience and knowledge. Schedule internal seminars on operational topics focusing on drilling operations and high risk well intervention

This approach of linking human factors in design and planning could potentially improve overall HSE performance by 15-25% and eliminate well blowout incidents.