Business drivers continue to provide reasons to find better ways to drill wells. These drivers include a shortage of skilled drilling professionals and the persistent goals of reduced risks, improved safety and reduced costs. Those in the industry have long realized that there is no "silver bullet" for meeting these challenges; rather, a successful solution requires the right combination of people, processes and technology.
To help operators meet these challenges, Schlumberger provides a combination of people, processes and technology through its Operation Support Centers (OSC). Actual experience has already demonstrated that OSCs successfully address industry issues, but also go beyond solving the problem at hand, to transforming drilling work processes, resulting in more efficient and effective drilling monitoring and operations.

Operations
The OSC is a system consisting of people, processes and technology to perform remote monitoring and operations around these key areas: drilling optimization, well placement and formation evaluation.
Depending on client needs, a mix of experienced personnel, workflow processes, drilling technology and drilling software can be combined with client resources in a variety of ways to provide a unique collaborative environment to meet drilling objectives.
OSCs are flexible and scalable. Depending on client requirements, they can be as small or large as required, ranging from the company's in-house OSCs (currently there are 27 operating worldwide) resulting in no footprint in a customer office; to portable OSCs that can consist of a cart or trolley used to store equipment configured for short-term projects; or a dedicated room or rooms for full-support centers built in customer offices, for longer, larger projects. The number of rigs being monitored, combined with the services being performed, and the hardware and software required to carry out those services dictate the requirements for an OSC.
Collaboration and communication infrastructure and capabilities are available through either customer or company facilities and resources, or a combination of both. Different levels of services are also available, again, depending on specific customer needs. The technology philosophy is vendor-neutral and uses software that allows for integration of various vendor products.
The 27 OSCs operating worldwide are organized to support key geographic areas and specific demands. For example, the first OSC located in Aberdeen, Scotland, was launched in response to the demands of North Sea-based operators, in part because of the inclement weather and rough seas that make transportation to and from a rig risky and sometimes impossible.

Remote monitoring
For one major operator, a joint OSC team composed of engineers from several disciplines from the company and the operator provided key geomechanic and well placement support to the operator's remote drilling operation as part of the operator's real-time integrated operations initiative. During the day, the drilling optimization (DO) team worked onsite in the client's OSC supporting drilling operations for a rig in the Norwegian Sector of the North Sea. At night they handed over the tasks to personnel in the OSC in Aberdeen.
The DO phase of the project involved optimizing the speed through 13,124 ft (4,000 m) (measured depth) of overburden. Other activities included monitoring shock and vibrations and simulation and frac jobs. A key tool used for monitoring was PERFORMView real-time drilling analyzer software that takes discrete depth- and time-based data points of drilling and logging data, and, in real time, analyzes and presents data in 2-D and 3-D formats to provide context and meaningful information (Figures 1 and 2).

More projects, fewer people
OSCs have many obvious benefits in meeting the challenges of our business. For one, they allow for coverage of more projects using the limited number of experienced drilling professionals currently available in the industry. With a shortage of people entering the field, and the impending retirement of seasoned veterans, there simply are not enough people to place experienced staff on all drilling rigs, for all the world's current drilling projects. OSCs provide a safe, efficient way for trained experts to work on several projects at once.

Improved collaboration and training
Beyond solving problems, OSCs enable improvement to existing processes. For one, OSCs provide
better access of experts to each other and to their less-experienced colleagues, and a better collaborative work environment. Professionals from different projects and different disciplines are gathered together in one place, enabling them to more easily share the knowledge among themselves and to collaborate to solve specific problems.
OSCs also enhance training by providing access to hands-on training without actually sending new personnel to a rig - at least not until they have a better understanding of what they will be doing once on site. This is not to say that OSCs will take the place of traditional training, only supplement it, allowing new personnel to focus on drilling-specific tasks in a safe office environment. A better understanding of their job before being on site allows for increased focus on safety once they get to a rig.

Reduced risk
Even if there were enough trained drilling professionals for all current projects, having fewer people on a rig (especially people new to the industry and unfamiliar with rig operations) reduces risk and increases safety. While industry professionals and management work continuously to improve processes and mitigate and eliminate risk, drilling for oil is an inherently risky endeavor. If the technology exists to move personnel away from hazardous locations to a safer workplace, it is wise to do so.
Reduced personnel requirements on a rig also reduce the risks and costs associated with transporting
people to and from the rig. A recent client request specifically asked to reduce personnel traveling to a remote rig; that request is currently being serviced from the Oklahoma City, Okla., OSC.

Real-time decision making
In another North Sea example, the Aberdeen OSC was able to run premium logging-while-drilling services for Nexen Petroleum's 21/02-10 exploration well, instead of having to send a team offshore to the drilling site. The true, real-time acoustic measurement service allowed for slowness-time-coherence projections to be seen while drilling, and delta-t-compressional and shear curves to be labeled in real time. As a result, the client did not need to wait for recorded mode data before establishing confidence in real-time data, and got a good match between the recorded mode and real-time data.
Running the service from the OSC resulted in fewer personnel offshore, reducing associate risks and costs,
and improved collaboration between operator and service company team members. Ultimately, decisions could be made in real time, ensuring safe drilling operations and reduced rig costs.

Comments