Drilling Performance Improvement Through use of Artificial Intelligence in Bit and Bottom Hole Assembly Selection in Gulf of Thailand
Abstract This paper describes a method of transforming legacy manual bit/BHA planning process into a digital solution to enhance drilling assembly selection efficiency and consistency. The solution presented improves overall capital stewardship thru an effective and semi-automated use of data to deliver high quality decisions and improve decision consistency across drilling applications and drive drilling performance. Data science and machine learning is applied to streamline the data preparation process and present to the user a statistically sound drilling assembly solution for the drilling environment input. A large +6000 well database is used to explore alternatives and rank potential solutions using performance and directional compatibility characteristics unique to the Gulf of Thailand. The digital project goal presented is two-fold. The first is to streamline all related data and decision processes in the office to improve work efficiency and information accessibility. The second goal is to improve field drilling performance by installation of a self-learning advisory tool. There is a requirement for multiple sub-processes to work in parallel. The population of data in the database and quality checks must be automated to handle hourly/daily data updates. A system for auto-loading drilling data from rigsite was created. A second system containing data science and machine learning was created to identify similar wells, rank their respective performance and directional compatibility to a future well of interest, and offer a statistically relevant solution recommendation. A benefit of such a system is a more efficient workflow with improved field drilling results while effectively capturing Chevron Thailand methods for many drilling engineers to use in the future. Adopting agile concept during development phase is one of the keys to success for this project. Additionally, utilization of digital transformation technology is a key enabler to handle big data, data science and data foundation.