Drilling Advances

Help Wanted: Must be more adept at operating a mouse than a brake handle.

Allegory aside, fingertips may become the hardest working appendages of tomorrow’s rig hand. Just as automated pipe handling systems have supplanted one manually-intensive exercise, visionaries see no end to robots stepping in to do most of the heavy lifting, thus relegating traditional rig-floor jobs to the occupational dust bin. “It used to be, you had a toolbox full of wrenches and tubing benders. Now your main tool is a laptop,” veteran rig hand Donald McLain, turned chairman of the industrial-programs department at South Texas’ Victoria College, told Bloomberg on Jan. 23.

Pointing to technologies that support the digital oilfield concept, automation advocates say that in the near future, only the most technically savvy need apply. On June 27, UK-based recruiter Petroplan released the results of a survey of 2,000 industry professionals, in which more than a third put IT talent near the top of disciplines most in demand. Nabors, which in August announced plans to buy Tesco to beef up its technology platform, has been quoted as saying automation holds the potential to reduce per-rig headcount from 20 to five workers.

Not so fast. However, as reflected in the fragile recovery and the increased hiring of rig and frac crews in the most active shale plays, roustabouts, derrickmen and their ilk should not immediately concern themselves with being replaced by machines, says Patterson-UTI Energy CEO Andy Hendricks. “You’ll see improvement in software, but because of everything that’s happening, people who work on drilling rigs don’t have to worry,” Hendricks told the Houston Chronicle on July 30.

Hendricks noted that hiring experienced rig personnel in plays, such as the high-octane Permian basin, is particularly challenging these days, especially for the more localized companies. “If you’re a local West Texas company trying to hire people, there’s nobody to hire. In our case, we work across multiple states, and we have a national recruiting campaign.”

Though the justification for automated drilling systems is rooted in improving efficiencies and reducing costs with fewer workers, any ensuing staff reductions would be gradual, and a far cry from the sweeping personnel adjustments spurred by the industry’s intrinsic boom-and-bust cycles, says Mark Agerton, a graduate fellow with the Baker Institute’s Center for Energy Studies at Rice University. He noted, however, that it is unlikely operators and service companies will return to high, pre-crash employment levels.

“Turning to today, employment in oil and gas support activities has begun to tick back up, which is good news for a hard-hit workforce. Currently, the biggest obstacle to employment gains in the short-to-medium term is not job-killing advances in automation, but a more mundane reality that cyclical resource prices are still low, and firms don’t need to hire many people just yet,” he wrote in a May 10 Forbes article. Historically, he argues, technology advancements enabling operators to produce more at better margins have increased, rather than reduced, employment. “This drove increasing investment and employment, as drilling rates accelerated faster than technology diminished the labor requirement per barrel of oil.”

Employee multipliers. For Pioneer Natural Resources, embracing leading technologies is not so much intended to shrink payroll, but to maximize the efficacy of the existing workforce. Pioneer says exploiting the latest innovations is critical to meeting the firm’s ambitious goal, set in 2016, to more than quadruple production to 1.0 MMboed within 10 years.

“Right now, we produce 250,000 boed and we’re going to 1 million (boed). We have 3,600 employees. We’re not going to have 15,000 employees when we get to 1 million in 10 (years),” Executive Vice President Chris Cheatwood said during the first-quarter earnings call. “So all of these technologies add up to be, what we call, people multipliers, work multipliers, however you want to look at it.”

Said technologies include a “physics-based drilling system” being developed jointly with third parties. It comprises dynamic drillstring modeling software; a proprietary downhole tool to gather and transmit high-frequency data; and a real-time prescriptive analytics platform, Cheatwood said. Since April 27, Pioneer has been working with MSC Software Corp., which is customizing its Automated Dynamic Analysis of Mechanical Systems (Adams) software package for full-well simulation. According to MSC, the reconfigured software will enable Pioneer to vary drillstring components, operating parameters, wellbore geometry lithology and control algorithms, to better understand their effect on drilling dynamics.

“What we’re building is like a traction control system for your car. We’re always trying to drill wells faster, live out there on the edge, so we can reduce the drill times. But often, we push it past the edge, and we produce nonproductive time,” he said, adding, “What’s even more exciting about this is that with the capabilities of machine learning, not only are we going to go to a level of prediction to get a warning, we’re going to get to a level of prescriptive analytics, where it’s going to be telling us what to do.”

If nothing else, automating the drilling process may require changing the nomenclature of rig floor positions, says Frank Springett, National Oilwell Varco’s director of engineering R&D, who oversees the firm’s evolving NOVOS process automation platform. Speaking at the IADC Drilling Engineering Committee (DEC) quarterly technology forum in June, Springett said, “the driller will become more of a process supervisor, with responsibility for planning and the freedom to optimize (the drilling process).”  

About the Authors

Jim Redden

Contributing Editor

Jim Redden is a Houston-based consultant and a journalism graduate of Marshall University, has more than 40 years of experience as a writer, editor and corporate communicator, primarily on the upstream oil and gas industry.