As big data and automation play increasingly significant roles in drilling operations, the skill sets required of drilling engineers of the future are also changing. For one, they will need to be adept at data analysis, Dr Eric van Oort, Consortium Director for the RAPID program at UT’s Cockrell School of Engineering, said at the 2017 SPE/IADC Drilling Conference in The Hague, The Netherlands...

By Kelli Ainsworth, Associate Editor  As part of its efforts to lower offshore drilling costs, Diamond Offshore has developed the Floating Factory drillship concept. The rig features a Huisman drill tower, a dual mud pit system and 50% more rig space than typical sixth-generation drillships, James Hebert, Director of Operations and Technical Support for Diamond Offshore, said. “We all agree that we need to reduce well delivery times and improve the economics to try to drive the costs of offshore development,” Mr Hebert said in a presentation on 14 March at the SPE/IADC Drilling Conference The Hague, The Netherlands. “We’re trying to take a step back from how we previously looked at rig designs and trying to see what we ...

Baker Hughes’ newly released TerrAdapt adaptive drill bit is expected to deliver dramatic improvements in drilling economics by using automation to mitigate downhole dysfunctions that cause inefficient drilling and costly tool failures. With the industry’s first self-adjusting depth-of-cut (DOC) control elements, the TerrAdapt bit automatically changes its aggressiveness based on the formation through which it is drilling to mitigate vibrations, stick-slip and impact loading...

Although automated drilling has been a popular discussion topic among drilling engineers for much of the past decade, practical solutions have been slow to emerge. Since its launch in May 2015, the University of Texas-based Rig Automation and Performance Improvement in Drilling (RAPID) consortium has worked to speed the pace of automated drilling innovations by delivering pragmatic and immediately applicable solutions to some of the drilling industry’s most pressing issues...

In every industrial power application, energy must be supplied to the process in a manner that does not limit performance. The energy supply must be capable of meeting the dynamic demands of the industrial process requirement...

The IADC Drilling Control Systems (DCS) Subcommittee, which operates under the IADC Advanced Rig Technology (ART) Committee, has published the IADC Drilling Control System Alarm Management Guidelines. “The guidelines provide a baseline of recommendations for best practices on how drilling contractors can approach alarm management and drilling control systems,” said Christopher Goetz, Partner at Kingston Systems. Mr Goetz serves on a working group of subcommittee members that is leading development of the guidelines.

Predictive maintenance has the potential to help drilling contractors better understand when equipment needs critical maintenance in order to prevent unexpected failure. Avoiding unexpected equipment failure is critical to reducing safety incidents, as well as nonproductive time. Watch DC’s video with SparkCognition VP Solutions Philippe Herve from 16 November to learn about new technologies such as cognitive analytics and machine learning that can help the drilling industry implement predictive maintenance. Mr Herve also gave a presentation on predictive maintenance at the Spark Tank forum, held by the IADC ART Future Technology Subcommittee on 27 October in Houston. Before specializing in predictive analytics, he spent 30 years working for oilfield service companies.

Implementing mechanization on drilling rigs has made many processes, like pipe handling and casing running much more efficient. However, the casing running process has been mechanized in silos...

GE and Maersk Drilling announced a partnership today to collaborate on a data analytics pilot project to increase Maersk’s drilling vessels’ productivity and to possibly reduce maintenance costs by up to 20%. The two companies have collaborated to deploy SeaStream Insight, GE’s new marine asset performance management program, powered by Predix. The pilot project will be carried out on one of Maersk Drilling’s...

Poor quality of real-time data at the rig site remains one of the drilling industry’s most critical challenges. It can, for example, impair the ability to measure, analyze and improve processes. The Operators Group for Data Quality has set out to improve the industry’s data quality by defining standards for the process capability requirements for...