Integration of Geosteering into an Automated Wellbore Placement System, Possibilities and Challenges

The benefits of geosteering for accurate wellbore placement in reservoirs are well documented, with an emphasis on comprehensive reservoir mapping capabilities and related well path adjustments. Similarly, drilling-related processes such as well re-design, proximity scanning, and downlinking are important. The integration of geosteering and drilling processes adds complexity and challenges to designing automated wellbore placement systems. Automated systems need to contain sufficiently robust technologies and algorithms to avoid unintended and frequent exceptions. Equally, the human element must be considered to design an automated system with a great user experience. To gain user acceptance, an automated system must have the characteristics of predictability, transparency, adaptability, and automation levels that are validated prior to utilization. Without this, the result will be wellbore misplacement by engineers who blindly trust immature automated systems. This paper provides an overview of processes and tasks within a comprehensive wellbore placement system, including the directional drilling and geosteering services as used by stakeholders who own well placement execution. We will provide an overview of the potential of automation and pitfalls to be avoided. The experience of many expert engineers from complementary disciplines has been used to develop a comprehensive concept as a framework to implement an automated wellbore placement system. The paper also provides an analogy to the automotive industry which has developed reliable and robust systems for navigation, lane and speed control over the last few decades. The comparison highlights a fundamental difference to the petroleum industry of having multiple stakeholders involved in the process of wellbore placement. Consequently, communication between all the stakeholders during operations, notably proposals and approvals, must be designed into the system from the beginning. Automation concepts to achieve great user experience are demonstrated on components of a wellbore placement process, including the illustration of lessons learned from recent development initiatives. Based on the demonstration, we conclude that an iterative development process is essential to ensure acceptance by the user community.