Enabling Digital Transformation by Automating the Well Trajectory Design

Abstract PDO is transforming its well and urban planning by adopting digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve organisational efficiency and maximise business value through faster quality decisions. Since 2020, PDO has collaborated with a third-party contractor to provide a novel solution to an Industry-wide problem – how to reduce the well planning cycle by effectively plan +100 wells in a congested brownfield setting. This work has resulted in 2023 in the organization-wide deployment of a full-stack customized AI-assisted solution, which is now starting to become embedded in the well delivery and field development planning workflows. Traditional well delivery and field development planning workflows in the industry are still very manual, time-consuming (multiple man-months of work), and sequential. Well-delivery and field development planning in congested brownfield assets require close collaboration between multi-disciplinary teams - geologists, well engineers, geomatics, concept engineers, and reservoir engineers. In particular, in planning 100+ infill wells in fields with limited remaining options for well pads and hundreds of already existing wells. These conventional and sequential ways of working, are therefore likely to leave value on the table because it is difficult to find new feasible well locations and trajectories to optimize the development efficiently. The tested and implemented workflow includes a self-learning AI algorithm to auto-generate feasible well trajectories combined with an optimization solver for finding preferred surface locations in a constrained urban plan. These are integrated into a full-stack digital solution with direct interfaces to PDO's corporate data repositories. The computations and resulting analysis are facilitated through an intuitive user interface that enables transparency and keeps users in control while improving efficiency with AI assistance. The novel approach leads to a step change reduction of +40% in cycle time of the Data Analysis phase (from 6 to 3 months), for well and urban planning in a complex brownfield (800+ existing wells), to design 100-200 infill targets. The Value calculation in one of the piloted assets reflected an additional amount of 5 million USD in the NPV of the project. It provides potential game-changing digital solutions to PDO and the industry, enabling improved performance, much shorter cycle times and robust, unbiased well trajectories. In summary, this is a tangible example of real digital transformation of a complex problem through a full-stack integrated AI-assisted solution. The new approach transformed the process from a sequential well planning workflow into an iterative and fast AI solution – parallelized urban planning method, including all technical considerations while adding significant value represented in hydrocarbon acceleration / early production.