Introduction to collaborative field development planning
In some organisations, geophysicists and geologists, production and reservoir engineers, have formed separate groups working in isolation, while drilling engineers have been caught in the middle.
For them, planning wells has been a task where guesswork often supplemented genuine and accurate information, painfully gathered through coordination meetings, one to one sessions, memos and even electronic files on the company intranet. Finally it all boiled down to the geologist handing the drilling engineer a set of coordinates for the target(s), a geological forecast to TD, some anticipated formation pressures and very little else.
Planning and budgeting for a well could then take anywhere from a week to a month, even with the invaluable assistance of some computer programs, until the time when a new piece of information came to light: a fault, a geopressured sand body, and surface gas. Then the planning process had to be started all over again.
It soon became apparent that, faced with increasing daily costs and diminishing returns, scarce opportunities for highly rewarding farm-ins, low oil prices, the companies could not let inefficient practices spread throughout their operations.
Oil and Gas companies have encouraged and welcomed the fairly recent development of interdisciplinary software and the promotion of efficient teamwork among the various players in their exploration, production and drilling departments. They had to become more reactive and use their limited resources to the fullest.
Working from a common database, geoscientists and drilling engineers, together with production and reservoir engineering specialists, could now retrieve and use information in real time.
This is the key to developing accurate drilling plans, optimized in terms of maximum chances of safely reaching the target(s) at the minimum operating cost.
The time frame of the planning process has been dramatically reduced, to hours, not weeks, by integrating the drilling software with that of other disciplines.
