Optimization of time, effort, and costs for well planning using standardization and automation of the well design process on a cloud-based solution

Abstract The current well planning process for operators is capital-intensive that takes time and has a lot of discrete, disconnected steps. Well planners and engineers dedicate a significant amount of time and effort to analyze sub-surface and offset well data for trajectory planning, casing policy selection, casing design, torque & drag, hydraulics, time & cost analysis etc. For development wells and unconventional wells, it is a common scenario for drilling engineers to have a very clear understanding of how the well design shall look like as the oil & gas field is extremely well familiar. As an initial step towards standardization, a review and study of several well design processes were performed by interviewing several engineers, all around the globe. The study revealed that even though every engineer had their own way of working, there was an inherent workflow that could be standardized. This standardized workflow was then outlined with user experience development techniques to cater to the generic steps that well planners, engineers and managers had described. With implementation of this standardized workflow and UI/UX supported process, the next step was to build a cloud native solution which supports micro-services-based engineering calculations in the backend. This allowed to implement speed and scalability in the solution which can cater to various personas in a team. The next step was to automate the process for a development field. This was achieved by applying checkpoints in the workflow to identify an exploratory well vs. a development well, before calling a microservice. For a development field, the microservice architecture identifies the design aspects of an existing well and incorporates similar well trajectory turn points, casing policy, casing design, BHA, fluids, operational parameters etc. while honoring the surface hole location, targets, and datum reference of the new wells to be planned. This technique helped to not only automate the engineering calculations but also speed up the entire process of designing each well in under a minute. Apart from engineering calculations, a planning workflow is never complete without team governance, approvals from peers and supervisors, testing various scenarios and creating reports. As these tasks are an inherent part of the planning cycle, they were also incorporated in the workflow. The UX design process techniques ensured that these supplementary tasks were a part of the main workflow and did not interfere with the calculations. The solution has shown a tremendous increase in the work efficiency of user by reducing the planning efforts from days to minutes. The users can now focus on wells using management by exception as the entire design process can be automated. This also eliminates any unnecessary data entry and avoids errors.