The Journey for Digital Well Delivery Technology Adoption: The How and Why

Abstract

As part of the industry 4.0 revolution, digital technologies are forever changing the way we do things. native cloud applications are able to adapt to specific processes and requirements, particularly those related to well construction planning driven by an automated collaborative solution. The operator of the future will use its engineers mainly for engineering analysis and social interactions, while the system will take over tasks such as orchestration, data mining, and experience management. Based on the definition of a new way of working and the application of new workflows, a thorough trial process was required to evaluate the solution usability and to define the minimum viable product requirements to be developed within a strategic partnership prior to rolling out the technology. The requirement was to enable globally dispersed teams, even across company borders, collaborating through automatically orchestrated processes, supported by knowledge and experience management systems in the background, to deliver a digital drilling program and ultimately accelerate the field development program. The operator decided to prove the concept through a series of pilots within a well-educated well planning team. Major assumptions to the business case were tested while planning actual drilling operations with the purpose to de-risk the value proposition. All different tested elements are captured by the users and the gaps to the final solution are ranked for joint development. The back-end interoperability of the solution supports a fully connected model, where data from subsurface systems can directly feed the well construction planning platform. The automated updates in the end-to-end workflow would ultimately simplify the way drilling engineers work, but also upscale the nature of their work by including many new elements as part of the routing analysis. Supported by the cloud computer power and flexibility, remote working is seamlessly enabled to removing the classic silos and digitally promote the collaboration. Standardization across the whole organization by corporate managed settings reduces iterative control processes. Furthermore, management of change is a key aspect to consider alongside the technical elements. The result of the extended trial confirmed that achieving the minimum viable product requirements of the operators was well within reach and confirmed the operator's value case to a large extent. In this paper we will describe the extended trial process, objectives, and associated workflows, in addition to the collaborative team nominated by both partners. The scope was user centric to assist with competency development and technology adoption. Parallel to confirming the minimum viable product, the extended pilot resulted in a prioritized list of co-developments leading to the full implementation of the operator's vision of a fully integrated well planning workflow.