Gilberto Gallo, Drillmec, USA, outlines the importance of technology to rig design and improving drilling performance.
T
he current market has tightened the space for drilling rig innovation, and rig design is caught in between necessity and limited economic feasibility. Drilling rig advances are therefore shifting from structurally based to data-driven and process-based ones that seemingly represent a more affordable low hanging fruit. The evolution of the full drilling rig packages now involves a total integration of the different product lines under one system of data management that produces key data for both operations and maintenance. In order to effectively exploit this potential, machine learning and AI are gradually being introduced and utilised, opening up to all sorts of data mining to improve drilling performance, equipment durability and maintenance, and reliable and safe operations. However, there still is plenty of room for conventional, operation-based progress, especially by using the newly historical data benchmark exploring new patterns and trends. For example, a recent study on statistics per well in the Permian Basin in Texas, US, showed that 97% (of the 10 terabytes per day per single well) was not being analysed. One of the largest
operators contracted a leading service company to analyse 7 years of data on progressive cavity pumps (PCPs), and through machine learning created an application capable of predicting with nearly 90% accuracy the exact day on which the equipment would incur problems, considerably improving predictive maintenance. The combination of the different advances has dramatically reduced the time for vertical wells drilled and the rig count, where 1000 rigs are able today to cover more ground than 4000 in the 1980s, in the US alone. This achievement went through several cycles of mostly incremental technology improvements, and taking a look at the nature and history of these enables understanding of the importance of innovation in the field, even during a down cycle like the current one. The historical evolution described in this article emphasises the different types of innovation, both in equipment and automation, developed in the HH-Series hydraulic hoist rigs across a 25-year evolution, culminating in fully automatic operations with the latest accomplishment of automatic casing drilling.
| 35
