Like an assembly line manufacturing process, batch drilling requires consistency and processes that can be rapidly and precisely repeated. What worked best for the top section of the first well should be copied and pasted over to the next top section, and the same can be done for the intermediate hole section and laterals. Rinse and repeat. It’s a problem of scale and a race against the clock. But accelerating batch drilling simply by blowing and going only trades off ROP increase with bit wear and wellbore tortuosity. What is required is a nuanced approach that harnesses data to make real-time decisions and keep ROP and bit life in balance.
With so many moving parts to batch drilling operations, however, how can teams keep track, sift data for insights, and maximize drilling efficiency? It’s a job too big for even one or two of Corva’s apps. It takes multiple types of apps working together in a perfect symphony.
Corva’s Drilling Efficiency Dashboard
Our ecosystem of 60+ drilling apps can be easily combined into dynamic dashboards that are best viewed on a big screen, PC or mobile device. Corva provides several dashboards out of the box for common drilling workflows and one of them is the Drilling Efficiency Dashboard. It gives onsite and remote teams a real-time view of operations with data-driven insights that power up drilling efficiency to the next level.
Corva’s Drilling Efficiency Dashboard is perfect for optimizing batch-drilling projects. The default dashboard is a mashup of four apps that seamlessly manage the complexities of tracking best-performing parameters across top hole sections down to the final lateral sections with the instant feedback crews need to dodge problems while optimizing ROP and slide percentage. Each app is typically used in the following sequence.
- Driller’s Roadmap – Corva’s DRM provides the initial best practices for each hole section and formation using best-in-class historical performance, helping to pinpoint optimal drilling parameters and BHA configurations. Once a formation has been drilled, the Driller’s Roadmap becomes the starting point for the next round of optimization.
- Parameter Comparison – Once best-performing wells and parameters by formation have been identified, the Parameter Comparison app enables drillers to stay on target with instant feedback on deviation from the best-performing well’s RPM, WOB, Torque, MSE, etc. With “Look Ahead” enabled, users can anticipate upcoming parameter adjustments and formation transitions.
- Days vs. Depth – Corva’s DVD app replaces the static plots engineers often rely on with a data-driven Days vs. Depth screen that provides the overall picture of drilling time and costs compared to what was planned for the current well. Importantly, it overlays the DVD plot for best-in-class offsets, which reaffirms that the target is matching historical performance.
- ROP and MSE Heatmaps – Best used in intermediate and lateral sections, Corva’s ROP and MSE heatmaps maximize ROP and extend bit life by enabling users to rapidly respond to changing subsurface conditions with red, yellow, and green color-coding that highlight optimal drilling parameters for WOB, Diff, and RPM.
- Although on the dashboard, our Metrics Engine is often used to identify best-in-class offsets, making it the first stop towards batch drilling performance.
Driving Batch Drilling with a Loop of Continuous Improvement
Like jump-starting a car, once initial best-in-class offsets have been fed into the Driller’s Roadmap for the first time, the Drilling Efficiency Dashboard updates on its own. It becomes a closed loop of continuous feedback and improvement from the beginning of a batch drilling project to the end. At the end of each hole section, best practices and lessons learned are automatically captured in Corva and available to be fed back into the Driller’s Roadmap.
If you are chasing ROP, this continuous feedback loop can really accelerate your entire batch drilling operation. If there was a BHA on the 3rd well that got you through the intermediate section in one run, you can easily copy that configuration for the 4th well’s intermediate. Multiply this constant refinement by dozens of parameters. The result is that all of your drilling projects will benefit from a compounding improvement to drilling efficiency that will profoundly decrease drilling times and costs.
Jul 18, 2024
