Experience Transfer in Drilling Operations

With the current economic climate most operators for deepwater drilling projects have tried to curb capital costs, particularly on drilling expenditure. Several operators have succeeded by focusing on operational improvements, such as reducing NPT, optimizing procurement practices or by improved management performance. Reducing costs by avoiding failure is an old practise in the oil industry. Practices to learn from failure has been ongoing for decades, as applying experienced learning is believed to be one of the main elements of low cost operations. This thesis provides a summary of experience from a full field development and an analysis of which areas experience transfer prove more valuable for saving cost and where it is not effective. In general, most operators apply experience through drilling data and reports from previous wells drilled into the same field and analyse these to extract experience and transfer the experience learned into the well planning stage. This study details how understanding sources of NPT and drilling experience followed by the successful extraction of experience from drilling data and transfer into the planning phase along with the experience from using numerical models and its results for well planning and how these are successful in reducing the probability of NPT events for the next well. This was done by designing a risk assessment and a short drilling program, using experience gained from wells drilled in the same or similar fields. Further work would include studies to explore the methods of integrating experience transfer with planning and real time surveillance. This could be done using an online database and using case based reasoning systems to extract experience from the database and transfer this experience automatically into well planning software and real time drilling software to create an efficient experience transfer system to effectively reduce the risk of NPT related events.