Urban Planning Tool: Innovative and Automated Assist Solution for Field Development Planning
Authors: Al-Mutairi F. Z. , AL-Refai S. , Alkhaldi A. H. , Kaushik A. , Dasgupta A. , Heyden Vander , De-Bruijn G. 
Published: October 2023

In large onshore field developments, front-end efforts to identify potential bottlenecks in Urban planning are critical to avoid challenges during the execution phase. The asset under study has more than 1500 existing wells and around the same number of wells planned through Integrated multi-well-pads. The objectives of the well-pad-centric Urban planning here are to 1) Identify upfront pad requirements to facilitate planning stability 2) provide inputs to the facilities design 3) check the drilling plan vis-à-vis realistic pad construction schedule. 4) minimize underutilized pads.

Owing to the high well count and multiple development scenarios, automation of the ‘Urban Planning’ workflow was a necessity in this Asset. Hence, the ‘Urban Planning Tool’ has been developed to combine drilling schedules from medium-term (Integrated Activity Plan) and long-term (FDPs and Simulation models). The tool assigns wells (subsurface targets) to well pads based on distance (i.e. drillable radius per reservoir), subsurface priority, and time. Thus, it also creates a well-pad demand forecast which is critical for planning construction and long lead items’ procurement. A realistic pad construction capability is used as a constraint on pad demand, resulting in a more reasonable long-term drilling schedule. Since long-term drilling targets are often notional, each well is assigned a "confidence factor" based on its subsurface target maturity. Aggregation of well "confidence factor" at the pad level provides pointers to focus on further maturation and rationalization of pads.

The tool reduced cycle time involved in the manual Urban Planning from 2 weeks to 30 minutes thereby enabling the evaluation of multiple scenarios that would have been challenging to perform manually. This contributed to manpower cost optimization. Additionally, the tool has helped in cost optimization of pads and flowline by rationalizing the underutilized pads. It helped to stabilize the long-term pad construction and drilling sequences and reduce the ‘Change of Scopes’ in the medium-long term. Moreover, it gives a heads-up on upcoming challenges in terms of pads and well resources required to achieve medium to long-term production targets. Other intangible benefits of the tool include highlighting potential maturation requirements for "low/medium confidence wells" thereby unlocking WRFM gains from them.

As observed in this project, for complex business processes like "Urban Planning", granularizing the overall process into steps in consultation with all participating disciplines and developing automated workflows can deliver end-to-end value to realize operator’s strategic targets. This unique workflow also contributed to mitigating surface congestion enabling the concomitant development of other assets sharing the same land. Even though this tool is tailored to the Asset’s specific needs, the workflow can be adopted for development planning of other large Assets to meet their unique challenges.