Drilling Advances

A boom or so ago, the rallying cry of “drill, baby, drill” drowned out the environmental entreaty to “keep it in the ground.” My, how times have changed.

Most of this year, operators have amplified the “keep it in the reservoir” movement, though their motivation is ground solely in reducing the economic waste stream. The active U.S. rig count, meanwhile, stood at a paltry 263 rigs as of July 2, according to Baker Hughes.

Even with the industry, particularly the shale sector, slow-crawling back to some semblance of a pulse, there are still those planning for better times, as reflected in upwards of 175 folks clicking into a virtual forum on June 24 to hear how digitalization and automation will drive the “Rig of the Future.” The future, however, is already here for the most part.

“In terms of looking at the needs for rigs of the future, what I’m looking for is more in the near term,” says Michael Behounek, Apache senior drilling advisor. “Given the current conditions we’ve been living in for a while, we’re not likely to see much more capital coming in to drive some of these innovations. It doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen, it’s just going to be a very slow pace.”

Behounek was one of four operator panelists, remotely laying out their wish list as part of the IADC Drilling Engineering Committee’s (DEC) quarterly technical forum in Houston.

Taste of the future. Given today’s global climate, Behounek said the industry will have to rely on tweaking existing technologies, as the emergence of a new generation of automated rigs is off the table for now. The best bet, he said, is to build on technologies that already have allowed operators to drill 3-mi. laterals in less than four days. “Can I get a taste of the rig of the future, which means living, at least, with what a modern AC (alternating current) rig is capable of and what more can I do with that, both from, one, a safety standpoint, and two from an optimization standpoint, not just on-bottom, but also for what we call the flat time.”

“To me, the rig of the future is more of an agnostic data type system with limited rig control and set points that goes from slide to rotating on a more consistent basis. We were already drilling 3-mile horizontal wells in less than four days, but what we are looking for is consistency,” he said.

John Willis, Occidental Petroleum’s director of drilling, completions and well servicing New Mexico, agrees, adding that his bucket list includes more granularity to existing automated systems. “We need to focus on near-term goals, as we expect we’ll be using the rigs we have today for a while. We do have a lot of automation in use today, with things like stick-slip control and pipe racking, but I would like to see more granular automation and try to take on individual components, like maybe automating some aspects of mud mixing or some aspects of BOP testing. There are other things we can do in the short term that would make an impact and help us move forward,” he said.

Going forward, BP Rig Automation Engineer Nathan Moralez said he envisions higher levels of instrumentation and robotics, with more advanced remote operations and entirely electric-driven equipment. “Some of this will be very difficult to do in the near term, but I think we’re definitely going to have to get to some of these places.”

For the time being, Willis said he is most intrigued with advancing existing developments in automated drill-ahead, pipe handling, tripping and directional control processes, which would require only expenditures for the control systems. “Longer term, we’d like to be able to control those things from our office and have a direct link from the drilling engineer’s plan to operation on the rig. That way, we can capture all the knowledge to make those processes very efficient and not have to retrain new drillers and new directional drillers every time we have a cycle in the rig activity,” he said.

Expertise lost. Therein lies the elephant in the room and perhaps the most formidable obstacle to anything resembling a recovery: the thousands of experienced hands removed from payrolls. As the economy recovers, and with it, healthier employment, bringing those employees back and attracting new faces to a notoriously cyclical industry will be difficult, at best.

“It’s a concern for us,” Willis said. “We talk a lot about how we’re going to have a whole wave of new directional drillers. We expect that a lot of the people that we’ve trained and helped to become very expert in our prior operations will not be back, and we’ll have to start over again.” “We will need to automate, so we don’t have to rely on a driller having years of experience to keep bad things from happening.”

Automation, however, can be a double-edged sword, if companies don’t do more to address the intrinsic human factors, says Moralez. “Human factors impacts on automation and digitalization are the biggest barriers of uptake in our industry, and we see it every day on our rigs. We see an automated or semi-automated process that’s not being used, because a driller may feel that he’s being ousted, or he’s not needed anymore,” he said.

Noting that “the human touch is still required here,” Behounek acknowledged that the loss of experienced personnel will lose a measure of the efficiencies gained earlier. Consequently, any discussion of future rigs must give equal weight to the human component, says Willie Thompson, Hess drilling and completions engineering manager. “The rig of the future can’t exist without the people of the future,” Thompson said. “The collaboration of all those work forces is the biggest enabler of the accomplishments we’ve had, and one of the biggest challenges to overcome.”

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.