By Amit Mehta
CEO of Houston-based Moblize
(www.moblize.com
Well drilling is utilizing more and more technology each year, yet engineers are still making many key decisions based on educated guesses. However, driven by innovative professionals, skilled in both E&P and data analytics, daily operations are becoming much more technically precise.
Making People Smarter
Getting better drilling results should not be a contest of man vs. machine. Instead, companies should augment bright, well-trained field personnel with actionable insights (AI) at their fingertips, not making machines smarter to replace rig personnel.
Human capital matters and is the biggest differentiator to drill wells right the first time. However, the fundamental challenge is that drilling shifts are not scalable. What does that mean? Operators may have the best hands on one rig but with no guarantee the same hands will be on the next shift or next rig. This is called insight deficit (ID) which, if addressed and corrected, can ensure scalability and optimize fleet-wide results.
How? Innovators aim to reduce this delta exactly by using data analytics to create insights enhancing human abilities to act on them, not replacing them. It’s a process of understanding and learning from the best, then leveraging or exposing new drilling knowledge to others fleet-wide.
Better Decisions Instantly
Virtually nobody would dispute that drilling wells is a complex undertaking where experience matters greatly in a high-stakes game. However, current demands such as reporting and recording have caused operators to re-think time spent on clerical vs. expert work. In other words, the objective should be to:
• Simplify their current daily workflows (tasks); and
• At the same time, amplify the human ability to make decisions instantly which results in big judgment success (effective outcomes).
For example, why should field personnel be making tedious minute-by-minute recordings of each rig activity and event? Then duplicating these efforts again to them produce the daily morning Drilling Reports? Followed by recording PUSO at each stand? Then by watching how connections are made? Placing orders for BHA? The answer is that field personnel should not be doing all that.
Capabilities exist today to automate a multitude of such tasks as illustrated in some examples below. Imagine from the smart phone itself that field personnel can record digitally and informally the activities at the rig and auto-populate the drilling report,
Not just that, they can attach necessary videos/pictures providing more context of well operations so engineers in offices do not have to keep calling the field to answer a multitude of unanswered questions. Further, imagine the recommended procedure for PUSO is automated via pattern recognition. By doing so, the machine calculates the actual PUSO points at every stand, thus freeing field personnel to focus on other critical tasks.
Imagine the machine amplifying field personnel capabilities by giving them the accurate state of every operation automatically and for the nearby wells instantly. By doing that, they can improvise and change parameters as necessary to optimize their active wells.
All these are not a futuristic wish-list. These are real ways that today’s oil industry innovators are technologically leveraging human capital and reducing insight deficits to ensure fleet-wide drilling optimization for every operator throughout the oilfield.
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