DEPARTMENTS • PERSPECTIVES
Matt Isbell, Hess:
Integration, standardization
will help propel
well construction
performance to
the next level
BY LINDA HSIEH, EDITOR & PUBLISHER
For some people, figuring out what they
want to do in life can be a long process
of self-discovery throughout their young
adulthood or even into their 20s or 30s. But
for others, like Matt Isbell, knowing that he
wanted to be a mechanical engineer came
like natural instinct, even at a young age.
“From as old as I knew what a mechani-
cal engineer was, that’s been my goal,” Mr
Isbell, Senior Drilling Engineering Advisor
for Hess, said. “I like to see how things
work, and I love the idea of technologies
and inventing new solutions.”
It also helped that, through his dad’s
job as a chemical engineer, he had many
opportunities throughout his childhood to
visit refineries and fertilizer plants around
the US. Having the chance to see large
machinery at work only fueled his curios-
ity. “I knew mechanical engineers were
the ones who got to design them. That was
what I wanted – to work with big pieces of
equipment and make them better.”
Upon graduating from the University of
Texas at Austin with a degree in mechani-
cal engineering in the late ‘80s, Mr Isbell
landed in the oil and gas industry, work-
ing as an R&D engineer for what was then
Hughes Tool Company.
One of his first projects , he recalled,
was to try and reinvent roller cone drill
bits so they could outperform PDC bits in
soft rock. PDC bits were still an emerging
technology at the time. The effort went on
for about three years before the engineers
decided it couldn’t be done. Although the
project wasn’t technically a success, it
50 turned out to be a valuable lesson for a
young engineer like Mr Isbell was at the
time: No matter how much time and effort
you put into R&D, “you cannot defy the
laws of physics,” he said.
Over the next 23 years, Mr Isbell gained a
wealth of drilling expertise through differ-
ent positions with Hughes Tool Company
and its various entities, including Hughes
Christensen and Baker Hughes. His work
included redesigning and upgrading the
company’s drilling simulator, as well as
observing field challenges around the
world and developing laboratory tests to
evaluate new drill bit designs and adapt-
ing them to various applications. Along
the way, he also added 28 patents and over
33 technical papers to his name.
But the work that Mr Isbell said he’s
most proud of from his time with Baker
Hughes was actually around the manage-
ment of people. He had helped to create
a program for the company’s new-hire
field engineers, focusing not so much on
developing their engineering skills but
on making sure they knew how to apply
those skills out in the field.
“The culture part is always the hard-
est part to teach,” he said, adding that the
program was designed to provide new
engineers with an immersive learning
experience. “Not only did they get to meet
the company representatives and drillers,
but they also got to see what a field sales-
man does and the logistics of the drill bits.
That did a great job of grounding them and
prepared them for a career in the oilfield.”
Focus on optimization,
standardization In 2012, Mr Isbell joined Hess when he
got the opportunity to help the company
design and launch its drilling limiter pro-
gram, SmartDrill. It focused on identifying
the factors that limit drilling performance
– whether it’s the drill bit, the motor or
rock hardness – and then redesigning the
drilling system to counter that limiter.
In helping to deploy SmartDrill in the
Bakken, Mr Isbell said he quickly realized
that the drillers and company representa-
tives out in the field knew the formations
“like the back of their hands. They knew
what the problem was; they just couldn’t
tell you what the solution was.” So, instead
of developing tools that helped them to
As Chairman of the IADC Drilling Engi-
neers Committee, Matt Isbell says he
hopes to continue growing the group’s
quarterly technology forums. The fi rst
forum of 2022, scheduled for 30 March,
will focus on developing the drilling
workforce of the future.
identify the limiters, the program focused
on deploying new technologies to address
those limiters they already knew about.
This work pivoted Mr Isbell’s focus
toward drilling optimization, process auto-
mation, real-time systems and now to
standardization, where the goal is to create
value by removing variability in the well
delivery process. Hess is now working on
a system where its drilling contractors and
service providers can input their standard
procedures next to standardized, time-
based objectives input by the operator.
“You can’t improve what you can’t mea-
sure. Standardization will allow everyone
to have visibility into what the objectives
are, so we can measure the delivery of the
plan and sustainably improve it over time,”
he said.
A key piece of this improvement process
will involve the industry’s ongoing work
to integrate discrete automation technolo-
gies. For example, you may already have a
system for automated sliding and anoth-
er system that automates coming off or
going to bottom, but those systems are not
fully integrated yet. “That’s the thing we’re
working on today: How do you take a plan
to drill a stand of pipe and then do that
200 times safely and efficiently to deliver
a 20,000-ft well?” DC
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