Improving Real-Time Drilling Data Quality Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Techniques

Due to high demand for energy, oil and gas companies started to drill wells in remote areas and unconventional environments. This raised the complexity of drilling operations, which were already challenging and complex. To adapt, drilling companies expanded their use of the real-time operation center (RTOC) concept, in which real-time drilling data are transmitted from remote sites to companies’ headquarters. In RTOC, groups of subject matter experts monitor the drilling live and provide real-time advice to improve operations. With the increase of drilling operations, processing the volume of generated data is beyond a human's capability, limiting the RTOC impact on certain components of drilling operations. To overcome this limitation, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies were introduced to monitor and analyze the real-time drilling data, discover hidden patterns, and provide fast decision-support responses. AI/ML technologies are data-driven technologies, and their quality relies on the quality of the input data: if the quality of the input data is good, the generated output will be good; if not, the generated output will be bad. Unfortunately, due to the harsh environments of drilling sites and the transmission setups, not all of the drilling data is good, which negatively affects the AI/ML results. The objective of this paper is to utilize AI/ML technologies to improve the quality of real-time drilling data. The paper fed a large real-time drilling dataset, consisting of over 150,000 raw data points, into Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Decision Tree (DT) models. The models were trained on the valid and not-valid datapoints. The confusion matrix was used to evaluate the different AI/ML models including different internal architectures. Despite the slowness of ANN, it achieved the best result with an accuracy of 78%, compared to 73% and 41% for DT and SVM, respectively. The paper concludes by presenting a process for using AI technology to improve real-time drilling data quality. To the author's knowledge based on literature in the public domain, this paper is one of the first to compare the use of multiple AI/ML techniques for quality improvement of real-time drilling data. The paper provides a guide for improving the quality of real-time drilling data.