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Drilling

 

Maximising the value of the Daily Geological Report

Operations Geoscience Conference, The Geological Society, London, 7-8th November 2018.

Efficient utility of quality information is a key component of how we make decisions. Therefore, as we rely more on real-time decision making and collaborative technologies, every opportunity to update legacy workflows should be taken. The DGR is commonly created as a stand alone document, carefully created by manually entering values and statistics in a digital application. A PDF is then generated and shared around the organisation. This is both time consuming and digitally inhibiting. This case study shows how automation can plan a key role in data integrity, limiting the amount of manual intervention and occurrence of human error. Maintaining a useful digital format throughout the report's life-cycle is imperative for real-time decision making in online collaborative workspaces. As we move into an age where we will increasingly rely on data analytics to provide lessons learned and well review information from a well database, the unique information in a DGR should also be as easily leveraged as sensor data.

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Post-drill analysis of Pore Pressure and Fracture Gradient from Well Logs and Drilling Events – An Integrated Case Study of a High Pressure Exploratory Well from Panna east, Mumbai Offshore Basin, India. Pore Pressure and Geomechanics from Exploration to Abandonment

AAPG Geosciences Technology Workshop, Perth, Australia, June 6-7, 2018

Over-pressure, one of the important drilling hazards seen globally, is mainly associated with narrow operating windows resulting in severe well control incidents and lot of nonproductive times (NPT). Accurate knowledge of pore pressure is fundamental to any safe and economic well construction. Mumbai Offshore Basin, a pericratonic rift basin in the western continental shelf of India, covers about 148,000km2 from coast to 200m isobath, sedimentary fill ranges from 1100-5000m. It accounts for nearly two-thirds of the annual hydrocarbon production of India. The studied vertical exploratory well has been drilled in the Panna East area of Heera-Panna-Bassein tectonic block to explore the Panna formation (Paleocene-early Eocene).

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Data Flow Management: Wellsite to Corporate Database - Case Study from ONGC WOB, Mumbai

SPG India, 2017

In today's competitive exploration and production (E&P) atmosphere, the ability to exploit E&P data is the key to make informed, actionable decisions that support the vision and business strategy. How a company uses its E&P data can be the difference between average performance and competitive advantage. Companies tend to segregate their content into different data worlds that do not necessarily interact with one another and therefore fail to achieve integrity and maximum business value.

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Deriving Business Value from Implementing WITSML

Russian Oil and Gas Technology (ROGTEC) magazine, Issue 022/04, October 2010

The Wellsite Information Transfer Standard Markup Language (WITSMLTM) enables the upstream oil and gas industry to communicate wellsite information efficiently. The benefits for adopting a standardized approach to exchanging drilling information are intuitive for most drilling engineers and managers in the industry and usually include the following reasons:

»    WITSML allows energy companies to leverage their investment in highly instrumented fields and enables new capabilities for automation and optimization that would otherwise be impossible or difficult to achieve.
»    WITSML reduces the cost of information exchange between software applications within an operating company and between operating companies, joint ventures, partners, contractors, and regulatory authorities.
»    WITSML reduces the cost of replacing or substituting software which results in improved functionality.

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WITSML Comes of Age for the Global Drilling & Completions Industry

SPE 124347, Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA4-7 October 2009

The development of WITSML started in 2000 with the objective of building an XML standard for the transmission of wellsite data in a consistent form that would enable the integration of information from different suppliers.  Energistics (formerly POSC) was involved from the outset and has provided independent hosting of the standard since early 2003.  BP and Statoil were early sponsors and a Special Interest Group was formed.  This has evolved steadily and today it includes representatives from all major energy and service companies.

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New Drilling and Completions Applications for a New Era

SPE 112094, Intelligent Energy, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, February 2008 

Most of the existing drilling and completions engineering applications in use today were designed to compute snapshots at a single point in time for one user, rather than presenting the acceptable operating envelope and its associated constraints over time and supporting interaction of multi-disciplinary teams in collaborative environments.

The massive increase in data now available from real time sensors can make identification of critical factors more difficult and can hinder, rather than enhance the decision making capability and response to alarm conditions. Currently, interaction between individual team members is cumbersome and it takes place outside the applications. Teams are increasingly multi-cultural, which places additional demands on the human-computer interface and cultural and linguistic preferences need to be considered, particularly where collaboration centres span international boundaries. The applications are also part of a growing portfolio, including office and knowledge management tools. Their usefulness and efficiency depends on successful integration. In turn, this depends critically on standards. The working practices emerging from the use of these environments means the earlier applications are no longer optimised for the circumstances in which they are to be used.

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Design, Implementation and Operation of an Advanced Collaborative Environment for Enhanced Performance in Tangguh Drilling and Completions

SPE 115511, Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, Denver, Colorado, USA, September 2008

The Tangguh Project in West Papua Province, Indonesia represents significant challenges in terms of drilling conditions, extreme remoteness, and social and environmental sensitivity. The Tangguh Drilling "Advanced Collaborative Environment?? (ACE) was designed to enhance drilling performance and safety. Very positive results were achieved within the first months of the drilling operation. This paper describes the design approach, implementation and subsequent operational experience of the Tangguh Drilling ACE. A number of features of this ACE have since become exemplars for BP's drilling operations globally.

The two-rig Tangguh development drilling campaign of 15 wells faced particularly difficult challenges with total losses, high vibration and the extreme remoteness of a location two timezones ahead of the office. To enhance drilling performance, an ACE was developed based on BP's global design principles covering people, process, technology, physical environment and organisation. The ACE connects each rigsite drilling team to the BP office in Jakarta and the onshore supply base. Real time drilling data in WITSML (Wellsite Information Transfer Standard Markup Language) format and high quality video conferencing were essential components to support the Wellsite Leader in the execution of the drilling plan.

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Energistics Standards Summit

Digital Energy Journal, Issue 10, Page 28, January 2008

Julian Pickering, responsible for new digital technology within the BP drilling and completions function, talked about his experiences driving the evelopment of WITSML at BP. "Talking about energy companies as a whole, we need to make WITSML attractive to all stakeholders," he said. "It's not about buying and selling but about working together so it benefits all." At BP there are several challenges to implementation," said Dr Pickering. "First there are human factors and politics, getting people to move on from past procedures." "Secondly BP has a unique structure that is very autocratic with multiple independent business units. There is no concept of a de facto standard; we have to work with each unit from scratch to present the business case." 

"Finally we have to present a consistent message, some of the feedback is not positive which raises the argument in favour of different solutions. We have to speak with one voice so there is no doubt about what we are doing." "It becomes easier to persuade a business unit to use WITSML if you have stories of other BP business units who have used it to gain value," he said.

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A Standard Real-Time Information Architecture for Drilling and Completions

SPE 110388, ATCE 2007, Anaheim, California, USA, 11-14 November 2007

BP is looking to implement a standard data architecture for real-time drilling & completions information. This will enable us to make wider use of our collaboration centres through a common approach and will allow us to leverage the developing WITSML standard more effectively in our operations.

BP uses many different service organisations to deliver its global drilling & completions agenda. In the past, this has resulted in a lack of standardisation in real-time information flow. We have been unable to share data and expertise readily between different operating centres. Applying a common approach to information access on a global basis will enable us to streamline our operations and make wider use of emerging collaboration technologies.

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Laying the Foundation for Increasing Efficiency of Intelligent Wellsite Communications

SPE 150278, Intelligent Energy 2012, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 27-29 March 2012

When implementing an intelligent oilfield strategy it is tempting to focus on smart technology: advanced applications, novel instrumentation and collaborative environments. The data architecture is often overlooked. As deployments increase, it is important to review the industry data foundation and future direction.
WITSML version 1.4.1 is here and takes several bold steps to provide a robust, real-time foundation for data exchange and preservation. This version, the product of over two years of collaborative work by participants from oil companies, service companies and technology providers, is poised to be the keystone of the intelligent oilfield data architecture for wellsite communications.
WITSML 1.4.1 is simpler, more efficient and better defined than previous versions. It addresses several problems that hindered earlier versions by clearly specifying API behaviour and resolving ambiguities. It is also more prescriptive, which makes greater demands on software vendors but assures the one thing that matters most: interoperability. With a host of technical improvements, including new data objects, broader scope, data compression, query optimisation and change logs, version 1.4.1 will help increase the speed of information transfer and simplify use and deployment throughout the industry. To support WITSML adoption, Energistics is putting more emphasis on product certification and has initiated accredited training for developers and implementers.

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