Achieving Superior Application Engineering: Proven Holistic Approach Disseminated to a Wider Community Key to Success

摘要

Delivery of performance through reduced well time while maintaining optimum wellbore quality requires a thorough understanding of the drilling environment, recognizing geological and drilling process hazards. Studying each component of the drilling system and environment in isolation prevents identifying the root cause of or fully understanding the problem, leading to less than optimal solutions and failure to deliver performance. To overcome performance barriers, we must first have an in-depth understanding of the root cause by taking a holistic approach to the analysis of the drilling environment. This organization developed a successful process within a dedicated drilling optimization group that enabled a structured approach to understanding the complete drilling environment. This successful process, founded on the continuous improvement cycle—plan, execute, analyze, and capture— delivered practices and technology recommendations to realize performance gains and significant well-time reduction.Taking lessons learned from one well and implementing these on subsequent wells delivered further performance improvements.The original drilling optimization group comprised a small team of highly disciplined engineers focused on detailed application analysis to minimize barriers to drilling performance improvement. This group’s work was the foundation of drilling knowledge tools within the organization; this work led to the development of industry-leading methodologies for data analysis and best drilling practices. The performance advantages realized by the team using this process lead the organization to recognize that its wider drilling community would benefit from the use of this process to deliver consistent performance gains.The authors will describe the process and how it has been applied to the wider drilling community to meet the needs of individual engineering disciplines and groups.The challenge to distribute the holistic approach and continuous improvement philosophy from a core group to the wider organization involved raising competency standards and the provision of dedicated knowledge transfer tools, creating an enabling environment to allow proactive performance management of specific applications. Finally, the authors will present several case studies that document success with the process.