Novel Application of Artificial Intelligence with Potential to Transform Well Planning Workflows on the Norwegian Continental Shelf

This paper describes the transformational application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Equinor's annual well planning and maturation process. Well planning is a complex decision-making process, like many other processes in the industry. There are thousands of choices, conflicting business drivers, lots of uncertainty, and hidden bias. These complexities all add up, which makes good decision making very hard. In this application, AI has been used for automated and unbiased evaluation of the full solution space, with the objective to optimize the selection of drilling campaigns while taking into account complex issues such as anti-collision with existing wells, drilling hazards and trade-offs between cost, value and risk. Designing drillable well trajectories involves a sequence of decisions, which makes the process very suitable for AI algorithms. Different solver architectures, or algorithms, can be used to play this game. This is similar to how companies such as Google-owned DeepMind develop customized solvers for games such as Go and StarCraft. The chosen method is a Tree Search algorithm with an evolutionary layer on top, providing a good balance in terms of performance (i.e., speed) vs. exploration capability (i.e., it looks "wide" in the option space). The algorithm has been deployed in a full stack web-based application that allows users to follow an end-2-end workflow: from defining well trajectory design rules and constraints to running the AI engine and evaluating results to the optimization of multi-well drilling campaigns based on risk, value and cost objectives. The full-size paper describes different Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) use cases of this AI assisted well trajectory planning. Results to-date indicate significant CAPEX savings potential and step-change improvements in decision speed (months to days) compared to routine manual workflows. There are very limited real transformative examples of Artificial Intelligence in multi- disciplinary workflows. This paper therefore gives a unique insight how a combination of data science, domain expertise and end user feedback can lead to powerful and transformative AI solutions – implemented at scale within an existing organization.