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Adel Al Shayaa and Khaled Al Tamimi, Mubadala Petroleum; Sara Bakhti and Dr. Arghad Arnaout, TDE
International Limited; Dr. Gerhard Thonhauser, Montanuniversitaet Leoben
This paper was prepared for presentation at the SPE Middle East Oil and Gas Show and Conference held in Manama, Bahrain, 18-21 March 2019.
This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE program committee following review of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s). Contents
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Abstract
The digital era is upon us in the oil and gas industry, enforcing the importance of integrating this novel
concept of digital transformation is mandatory to improve the overall efficiency of the drilling process.
The advances in Artificial Intelligence for the industry, and the methodology of how these solutions can be
implemented will be addressed in this paper.
The digital transformation of drilling will provide an unprecedented stream of high-quality information
that has never been accomplished in the industry, through the utilization of automated real-time drilling
downhole tools, data analytics and predictive analysis.
Therefore, a real-time measurement and processing technology based on automated rig activities
detection was established to improve the performance of the rig crew and drilling operations of an
international operating company. A monitoring process was implemented for all drilling operations and
benchmarked against operational Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Introduction
Currently the oil and gas industry seeking to increase the involvement of new advances in digitalization
technologies at different sectors. The big challenge is how the digitalization of the workflow of drilling
process can be done. When performed, it opens the doors wide to increase the engagement of different firm
levels in decision making process and make it more reliable and justifiable.
The first step towards improving digitalizing is to establish a system that collects and aggregate the data
from various sources. Usually rig sensor data is aggregated and stored at the rig site and then transferred to
the office. If the data of a poor quality, then it makes no sense to start with any monitoring or improvement
process.
Then, A digitizing step is essential at this phase to convert received raw data with high quality into a
digital status based on which we can build further decision models using computing powers.
At that point, the integration step of this information from multiple sources to one defined point - the
operating headquarters, allows the corporation to track the performance and establish goals.
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This digitalization process is an enabler to increase fleet efficiency and drill more wells in less time
through monitoring and control operations for the different business units. It can be achieved by setting
number of KPIs that are being used to assess the drilling performance with very short time intervals. This
gives a clear idea on the difference between drilling crews and different rigs in executing similar drilling
operations using same equipment. Measuring drilling performance from operational sensor data is the first
basic step towards improvement.
An essential step implementing a systematic approach of performance improvement and communicate
the performance gap to the drilling crews. This highly affects the performance improvement process and
maximize the outcomes of measuring the well delivery process.
The process consists of four main steps: Check, Act, Plan and Do.
1. Check is the first step that is required to measure and evaluate the current situation of the drilling
process. Automated reports generation and calculating the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are
the main tasks to give a clear evaluation and assessment of the drilling process.
2. Act is important to evaluate the results of the measurement step and to determine positives and
negatives in the current workflows, to decide what is required to improve the situation.
3. Plan is an essential stage to prepare for the required implementations. The required actions
concluded from the previous steps are converted into input for well planning and scheduling where
the KPIs Targets, Lessons Learned and Best Practices are now part of the plan.
4. Do is the execution phase of the process. In this step, all the planned actions should be executed and
reflected on the current workflows and coaching the crews to know how to react and run the plan.
4. Integrity: shows the ratio of valid consistent relations between different sensors, for example, if the
drill string is "In Slips" state and bit depth changes during this state, other examples are RPM with no
torque readings and pump strokes without any mud flow-in rate.
5. Timeliness: indicates whether the data is available at time needed.
6. Completeness: checks whether all necessary data received as it was expected.
7. Continuity: represents the regularity of received data or regularity of gaps in the data, are the gaps
received regularly or randomly.
Figure 3 Slip-to-Slip KPI histogram. In this histogram, the operations count (number of needles) is visible
on the Y axis and time ranges in terms of operation durations (needle duration) on the X axis. So, the green
bar of the left histogram means that 10% of the operations for Slip to Slip connections were made in the time
range of 1.5 to 1.7 minutes. The red line represents the target that has been set for this Key Performance
Indicator.
Three steps of improvement:
1. The distribution of timings for specific events have been analysed and targets set using the existing
Best Practice on the rig, shown on the histogram on the left – target 2 min (close or on the 50%
mark).
2. Improvement of the operational consistency by narrowing the distribution by more consistent
operations around the Best Practice shown on the histogram on the right – tighter bell curve.
3. The operational performance improves by learning and adopting Best Practices, so that the target
shifts to the left gradually over time along with the bars expressed with the arrows in the histogram
on the right – move from the orange towards the blue curve.
All operations that took longer than the target (bars right of it) are Invisible Lost Time. The shape of
the histogram can be used to assess consistency and the potential of target development over time. The
implementation of a performance culture and setting motivating competitive targets among crews complete
the efforts for performance improvement. This analysis can be done for all KPIs to identify the drivers of
savings potential.
Maybe there is a good reason to explain why the connections took longer than expected. But just sharing
this information between the parties helps the company to put the performance under control and support
the teams that sometimes suffer from a shortage in resources or face some technical difficulties to reach the
best possible and safest performance.
Using this technology for reporting drilling performance supports the company to develop its drilling
contracts and make the relation with drilling contractors based on and measured by performance KPIs. By
setting targets using different KPIs, the company can measure the performance and can identify all the
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deviations from the expected performance (the benchmark). This also supports the contractor if a crew needs
any support or when facing some technical difficulties.
ILT during drilling could be reduced by more consistent weight to weight connection times as well as by
proper wellbore treatment & conditioning timing. The hole cleaning procedure was not standardized, and
each crew performed it on its own. Training the Crews on working with the support of automated drilling
report would help to increase consistency while performing Slip to Slip Connections both during Tripping
and Running Casing.
Digitalization Transformation
Using historical drilling data, will enable AI technology to calculate future predictions, to learn from the
past to improve the future. The digitalisation of drilling process has the ability to sustain a constant flow of
information throughout the internal structure of this operating company and its unique setup.
Follow up the defined goals and track the improvement and efficiency over time and find a performance
gap to establish a feedback link to correct the deviations.
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The eventual goal is establishing and improving the global process and workflow of monitoring the
operating units for the multi-level operating team structure, by the means of high speed, digital data
technologies over considerable slower human factors.
The performance can be improved dramatically after Setting targets on a KPI basis. These KPIs targets
should be communicated to the crew and tracked on a daily. This would not only increase consistency but
also it could significantly improve safety.
An important stage in the performance improvement process is to discuss on a daily basis the rig crew
feedback & lessons learned, compare the planned and actual operations as part of the morning meetings and
update the well operations prognosis on a daily basis. The interaction between company team and drilling
crews based on accurate and unbiased information that is provided at the right time is the main contributor
for performance improvement.
As shown in Figure 6, Management can easily track the rigs’ performance through a management
dashboard that shows performance trends for the entire rig fleet monitored across different business units.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge proNova TDE team for their efforts to provide performance reports
in the required formats at the right time.