Drilling Automation - Drilling Automation: Are We There Yet?

Predictions about how technology will evolve a decade from now are likely to be wrong. In 2012, a group of 120 drilling and automation experts at an SPE workshop in Vail, Colorado, wrote a statement predicting what automated drilling would look like in 2025. After working through the issues over 3 days in groups, they agreed on a short statement that offers a useful yardstick for how far the industry has progressed in the 9 years since. Drilling automation is a dream that is just beginning to be realized. Since 2012, it has progressed further than many people thought possible back then. The workshop participants, 30% of whom were from outside the oil industry—including the operator for the Mars Rover that was then on its journey to the planet—spent a weekend arguing about the future and crafted a vision statement summarizing what drilling will look like in 2025. At the time, the statement seemed like a pipe dream to a lot of folks, said John de Wardt, who co-chaired the workshop. Since then he has tracked how drilling automation has evolved as the person in charge of the Drilling Automation Roadmap, an effort backed by the SPE Drilling Systems Automation Technical Section (DSATS) that lays out what needs to be done to make automation a reality and pro-vides information about the work already done. Based on what he has been seeing lately, he thinks the predictions by the people at the workshop are looking good. “In another 4 years, I am beginning to believe this thing” will look pretty accurate. He is also aware there are those who contend the skeptics got it right. Those conflicting views will likely come up at a presentation about the vision statement which is on the agenda of the seminar DSATS will hold before the 2022 IADC/SPE International Drilling Conference in March in Galveston, Texas. “That should be an interesting debate, as some have told me it is coming true and others push back in absolute terms,” de Wardt said. Sentence by Sentence Right or wrong, the statement offers a workable checklist for what must be done for drilling automation to become a reality. A close reading of the statement reveals a huge amount of change packed in every sentence. By 2025 DSATS predicted rigs for which “well plans are uploaded into an interoperable drilling system that automatically delivers a quality wellbore into the best geological location.” So far, automation’s impact is more focused. There is growing use of programs that directly control certain critical functions such as directional drilling or tripping. More functions are being added over time, informed by increasing amounts of digital data analysis. The next step is difficult: integrating all the automated functions to ensure maximum performance. The performance of a highly automated rig, such as the Nabors PaceR801, is based on how well it coordinates a complex sequence of steps.