The Impact of Digital Transformation on Cutting Drilling Costs - A Case Study from Oman

Abstract

Digital transformation is a process of applying all digital technologies on current workflows to be able to deliver high quality information at the right time. Improving well delivery time is one of the goals for applying digital transformation inside the company. The drilling performance should be reported on daily basis and all the drifting from predefined targets should be spotted and reported directly. Hence, the drilling crews require more detailed information of their performance, to proactively develop best practices and improve efficiency. Drilling process digitalization is one of the tools that has significant impact to achieve this goal. This was initially started inside the operating company to implement advanced digitalization technologies to monitoring and improvement drilling operations and to follow up drilling contractors through their digital footprints on the operational performance. The advances in digital technologies and tools provide enable measuring rig activities through real-time rig sensor data and merge it with other information sources. Therefore, a setup of a real-time digitalization tool based on automated rig activities detection technology is established and a measurement and monitoring process was started. The results of the digitalization process, after an initial evaluation period of approximately 1 month, exposed the savings potential by identifying Invisible Lost Time (ILT). As an example, the result of applying this agile and collaborative process, an improvement of "Weight to Weight" times between 45% and respectively 25% was achieved for two rigs, which reflects an actual saving up to 7% of the total well delivery time. The drilling team achieved measurable savings equal to one average total well duration in the one year of operation.