DigiWells: Digital Well Center for Value Creation, Competitiveness and Minimum Environmental Footprint

The objective of the center is to develop new knowledge, methodologies, and innovative solutions to improve the well delivery process enabled by digitalization, new sensors, high speed telemetry, automation, and autonomy. Drilling and well costs often constitute up to 50% of the total field development costs. According to NPD, drilling more wells is the most important means to increase recovery from existing fields. Decision making and optimization during planning and execution of drilling and well operations is challenging due to subsurface uncertainty, limited availability of measurements, and need for interaction between different disciplines and different commercial players. Main elements in the strategy of Petoro is more wells, improved drilling process, minimizing environmental footprint, digitalization and fast technology uptake. Profitable wells become increasingly important for development and operation and indirectly resource management at the NCS. Digitalization, new sensors, new high-speed telemetry solutions, automation, autonomy, and improved work processes has the potential to enable a step change of the well delivery process. The centre will explore these possibilities by combining domain knowledge with fundamental research to accelerate the digital transformation of the well delivery process. The centre aims to develop work processes for planning drilling and well operations, new sensors, solutions for interoperability, solutions for automated and autonomous drilling, and decision support systems for geosteering. New solutions are demonstrated at the national research infrastructures OpenLab Drilling, Ullrigg and against field data from operators. The centre is a collaborative arena for operators, service industry, public authorities, research institutions and academia in Norway and internationally. Results from the centres activity will enable innovation, business development, and value creation for the Norwegian society. Moreover, in collaboration with universities, the centre will educate the next generation of specialists who will help implement the achieved research results. Some important results from the center have been an innovative solution to damp vibrations in the drill string, methodology for planning the drilling operation in a robust way and methodology to enable interoperability across the relevant disciplines. A patent has been submitted for a solution for damping vibration in the drill string. The solution consists of using mechanical devices that are connected to selected locations along the drill string and that provide friction to dampen the vibrations. Algorithms for controlling these mechanical devices have been further developed, demonstrated on various cases and results have been presented at international conferences. It has been found that one can manage with far fewer of these mechanical devices along the drill string if one uses the right control algorithms. In order to implement this technology, it is very important that the desired effect is achieved with the fewest possible mechanical devices. The work on a new work process for well planning has made great progress and the work has been presented at an international conference. Software that is developed is made available as a microservice and thus becomes possible to test in a flexible way. The new work processes are being tested by operators in the centre. Researchers in the centre have been very active in international forums to promote industrial standards that support interoperability. Researchers in the centre lead activities in the international forums that hold regular meetings. Furthermore, results have been presented at conferences and in publications with international partners. A highlight has been another large demonstration of interoperability in the OpenLab research infrastructure together with several commercial players.

The report from Konkraft (2018) emphasizes the need for innovative solutions for digital collaboration between different companies and different disciplines within the petroleum industry to make the Norwegian Continental Shelf competitive. The primary objective is to develop new knowledge, methodologies and innovative solutions to optimize well production performance, enabled by an integrated and cross-disciplinary, adaptive well delivery process and a digitalization and automation driven approach The secondary objectives are: - Develop knowledge and methodology for cross-disciplinary analysis of well delivery - Exploit and adapt methodologies to extract information from new generation sensors in the well construction process - Develop methodology for flexible and seamless integration of new data and sensors to connect predictive modeling and smart sensing into an agile workflow - Validate and verfiy the new methodologies and technologies on selected field cases - Provide knowledge communication and dissemination with industry, the public and policy makers - Educate post doc, PhD students and master students The proposed SFI will utilize new types of data, high speed data transmission, high performance computing, data-sharing, standardization of formats and operational protocols, using a framework of open interfaces and open source solutions.