Digital Rig Management

Keystone has brought together an alliance consisting of Equinor and Odfjell Drilling to develop and demonstrate in full scale a Digital Rig Management solution (the Backbone Service) that will provide highly efficient and fully automated digital planning and execution process for drilling & well operations. The role of Keystone in this project is to apply its unique know-how in digital planning and work process tools to develop a product that will be tested by Odfjell Drilling in an offshore drilling and completion operation. This operation will be carried out on Equinor installation on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. Odfjell drilling and Equinor will guide the development using their experience and insight. The end product all activity planning for the well in a digiatl and structured method that will allow reducing ILT (Invisible Lost Time) for an average NCS well by 10% leading in overall time reduction of at least 2.5% for such a well. This translates into 7.5 million NOK in savings and will reduce CO2 emissions by approximately 112 ton per well. In order to develop and demonstrate the Backbone Service, Keystone will leverage its knowledge and experience with advanced algorithms for communication, big data analysis and machine learning.

The Main objective for the Demo2000 system test was to test the solution in an operational environment. The test proved that the system worked in an offshore environment, creating a good situation orientation for the rig crew that can make a significant change in how the rig can make a more efficient operation.

Keystone has brought together an alliance consisting of Equinor and Odfjell Drilling to develop and demonstrate in full scale a Digital Rig Management solution (the Backbone Service) that will provide highly efficient and fully automated digital planning and execution process for drilling & well operations. While considerable advances have been made in recent years in the area of autonomous drilling, the administration/management of drilling and completion operations is still dominated by use of outdated legacy software and Excel spreadsheets. This applies to such areas as logistics coordination, POB planning, operations scheduling, reporting, operations follow-up and experience transfer. Current state of affairs within most E&P companies is that well construction planning and execution spans multiple, disconnected systems that comprise a mixture of obsolete legacy software and semi-manual documents and spreadsheets. Historically, spreadsheet templates with macros have been used to document time plans. These have been manually populated with time estimates influenced by the past experience and judgement of an individual drilling engineer. Monte Carlo simulations have been then utilized to derive the estimates for planned tasks and activities. The resultant spreadsheet forms the master copy of the activity plan and is used to circulate the plan to drilling engineers, rig operators, logistics providers and service companies. The industry is discovering that the reliable and efficient passing of such plans between the multiple disconnected legacy systems is a practical impossibility, and that semi-automated integration has increased the probability of human error. Manually rechecking plan content throughout the process to prevent the loss or corruption of data during transfer has, to some extent, mitigated these problems but has required considerable resources and expertise.