Automatic for the People: Drillers Chase Consistency

Reliability and consistency: conditions craved by both the employer and the employee in every business. For oilfield workers, the future may mean workers trade in their hard hats for business casual.

The key: automation. Automated processes holds the key for the drilling and completions space, panelists said May 23 during Hart Energy’s SUPER DUG event in Fort Worth, Texas.

“We’ve seen the workforce change over the years, and it's very dynamic. There's a lot of churn in the service space,” Jeff Beach, vice president of Universal Pressure Pumping, told audience members. “Automation can help smooth out some of that competency as we see folks come in and out of oilfield services. Bringing some stability to our industry is a driver for us as well.”

“Our end goal is true predictive analytics, but it's proven to be very challenging to thread that digital needle to truly predict failures.”—Jeff Beach, vice president of Universal Pressure Pumping.

The future of drilling might see the typical forehand, roughneck or driller replaced with a technician to help keep automation components operational, Jim Jacobson, drilling engineering manager at IPT Well Solutions, said.

“As far as IPT goes and how automation is changing us, we just want to leverage that technology and then use as much of our own database and our own data to automate the way that we write AFEs [authorization for expenditures], the way that we program our wells and the way that we design the wells,” Jacobson said.

Justin Kuchta, director of business development for Liberty Power Innovations (LPI), said another benefit of automation is the ability to vertically integrate workflow. LPI facilitates the conversion to cleaner fuel using compressed natural gas. He said vertical integration allows LPI to “kind of control [their] own destiny” and provide a reliable fuel supply product and service to customers from start to finish.

Catalyst Energy Services achieves consistency and reliability through the use of automation in its VortexPrime hydraulic fracturing fleet.

“The creation of that control software was really paramount to the success of the overall project,” Seth Moore, co-founder, COO and executive vice president of Catalyst Energy Services said during the panel. “You have to have utmost reliability 365 days, because stuff obviously is going to happen nights, weekends and whatever…The electronic side, the control side was where we spent a lot of our effort to ensure that reliability and that efficiency was where we wanted.”

Threading the digital needle

While each company in the panel used automation to take a different approach toward consistency and reliability, they each agreed on the next step they should take to further their innovations: predictive analytics and condition-based monitoring.

“Our end goal is true predictive analytics, but it's proven to be very challenging to thread that digital needle to truly predict failures,” Beach said. “So a big portion of our emphasis today is just on condition-based maintenance and monitoring through a variety of our control systems and instrumentation there.”

Condition-based monitoring will allow companies to monitor wells and other assets with much less work, as they won’t always need around-the-clock supervision from a human. It will also allow issues with equipment to be addressed before they even pop up due to predictive analytics.

“You can use bots and computing power to actually take in a ton of inputs and spit out outputs that you need. You still need a human interface there and say, ‘Okay, make sure that it's dispatching,’ but you can have your software tell you where you need to go and when, and that helps drive that efficiency into that system,” Kuchta said.

But even with all the positives that automation and artificial intelligence brings, panelists agree value remains in good old fashioned, face-to-face communication.

In order to achieve the best wellbore and completion and have those assets work in tandem to reach peak productivity, clear communication is needed on how everything should be set up, where money should be spent and who is responsible for what. While it may make the process a little lengthier, Jacobson compared it to building a house, saying “you don't build a house and just put up the frame and then go live in it. You have to build all of it.”

Moore took the analogy a step further.

“You have to build a house that completions has to decorate and production has to live in it, right? Without the right house, we don't know where to hang the pictures, and then production doesn't like it,” Moore said. “We've seen wells where we couldn't conduct the optimal completion on because we had restrictions with specs on casing or other parts of the well. Some of that could have been solved up front much easier than what the fix is. And sometimes [the problem] is just not having everyone in the same room.”