Risk Management Approach: Drilling and Completion Projects

Abstract

This manuscript describes the approach in the risk management developed and implemented while operating 21 drilling rigs on 13 fields simultaneously in the Middle East, which resulted in 40% reduction of non-productive time. Well construction process requires a lot of attention on different levels and from different sides to ensure trouble-free execution. The bigger the volume of work, the higher the chance of a costly mistake. The risk management process was split in several steps, where different levels and divisions are involved. The Planning stage starts at engineering level and associated risk review goes to a level of Division Supervisor for every well, when special tools were developed to focus on potential high impact events. The Execution stage was covered by a set of Critical Activity reviews and Standard operation procedures, focusing on operations with highest risks or highest benefits. Further at the Evaluation stage every well was analyzed following the developed workflow, and further all obtained knowledge shared with every team member via custom designed dashboards. Shortly after initial steps were taken under the new risk management approach, one of main KPI – non-productive time (NPT) – started to decrease and dropped by 5% within one quarter. Further tuning of the process allowed to decrease NPT by over 40% with continuous positive trend. One of the main contributors is the re-focusing on the prevention measures during planning stage, which avoid non-conformance events with high impact. Simultaneously the approach unified the practices of different divisions and remove misalignment on most of the technical issues and questions. Additionally, it decreased the workload of the key field personnel, as reduced NPT gives more time to focus on continuous rig performance improvement.