Deepwater Well Control Training and Education in a State of Transition

Well control training programs for deepwater drillers and key rig personnel are undergoing a major overhaul that has been years in the making.

It is hoped that introducing new well control courses and exams will address recent incidents and new technologies. The overarching goal is to better prepare drillers for the challenges of deepwater wells.

The changes were made by the industry’s two largest well control certification bodies: the International Well Control Forum (IWCF) and the International Association of Drilling Contractors (IADC).

The IWCF began rolling out new programs last year and is continuing to add new changes. The IADC introduced its updated program in April and also said it has more work to do.

The IWCF’s new program is based on the recommendations made in a 2012 review by the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) that found the certification process needed improvements in a number of key areas. The report, which serves to redefine well control training, was drafted in response to the 2010 Macondo subsea blowout and the lesser known Montara blowout that occurred offshore Australia a year earlier. The IADC began reviewing its program in 2009 and said it accelerated the process after Macondo.

To address shortcomings, the organizations have added a long list of new courses and requirements that seek to strengthen a driller’s ability to deal with well control issues. Some of the new topics cover physical barriers, kick prevention and detection, shut-in procedures, and well kill procedures.

Additional focus has been placed on the instructors through new “train-the-trainer” and assessor training programs. The IWCF also conducted an internal audit of its accredited assessors and instructors. “As a result of the audit process, IWCF has suspended assessors and instructors at training centers who are not competent in conducting practical assessments or delivering courses to the required standard,” said Antony Quin, general manager of the IWCF.

In June, the group also appointed its first chief technical officer, Dave Conroy, previously of Schlumberger. On the organization’s website, Conroy said he plans to make more “significant changes.”

A Time for Change

For some veteran deepwater drilling experts, the changes are long overdue. Aside from a few exceptions, they argue that because the industry’s training and education programs have failed to reflect deepwater challenges, rig crews and drillers have been less prepared. They say this deficiency has led to major cost overruns and delays in deepwater projects around the world.

The experts are also concerned  that past lapses in education and training have increased the risk of a subsea well control event occurring in the future. Peter Aird, a drilling specialist and founder of Kingdom Drilling Services, has been working on deepwater projects for 27 years. In his work as a drilling supervisor on many projects for the past several years, he has noticed that as the waters have become deeper the drillers have become younger.

“In the last few years, there have been a lot of new rigs built and [the drillers] have come up the ranks too fast,” he said. “They have not spent enough time on the drill floor, and we are totally down the wrong rabbit hole when it comes to well safety.”

Aird explained what worries him is that the inexperienced drillers lack the knowledge about the complex geologies or physics involved to safely and efficiently drill deepwater wells.

When 1,000-ft depths qualified as the deepwater frontier in the 1990s, most wells were drilled in straight, vertical lines. Now, deepwater projects are pushing past 10,000-ft depths and the wells drilled are most often deviated and horizontal, and pass through narrow margin geologic formations, as was the case with the Macondo well.

These narrow margin and high-pressure/high-temperature (HP/HT) wells demand a greater degree of precision and awareness from drillers and rig crews than the comparatively straightforward subsea wells of yesteryear.

Due to the lack of experience and competency, Aird said a drilling efficiency of 50% is considered normal on the jobs that he works today. That means routine drilling operations are taking twice as long to complete as they should, and aside from causing nonproductive time, the operations are likely not being done correctly, he said. “People should be seeing this as a safety issue,” he said.

Robert Ziegler, interim chief executive officer (CEO) at RZI Deepwater Drilling Leaders, has seen many of the same problems in recent years. He said many deepwater operations face drilling delays because the less skilled drillers handle complex well control situations poorly, especially kick events.

“If you look at how people deal with kicks, that is where millions get wasted,” Ziegler said. “That is how you can have a USD 100 million well suddenly cost USD  300 million.”

And with offshore safety being paramount, the question turns back to whether deepwater drillers have been properly equipped by their employers to prevent the next Macondo from happening. For Aird, the answer is alarming.

“Was Macondo surprising? Of course, it wasn’t because Macondo has been so close so many times that the next one is just waiting to happen,” he said. “We need better educated and better trained drillers and we don’t have that.”

Problems With Past Programs

It is hoped that the new well control courses and exams for drillers will address past incidents, new technologies, and better reflect the deepwater fields being developed today. But it may take years for many drillers to benefit from the updates being implemented. Well control certificates that are being grandfathered in remain valid for between 2 and 5 years.

William Abel, a well control expert and founder of Abel Engineering, said he first took the IWCF well control exam in the 1980s. He became recertified 2 years ago for the supervision of an offshore drilling project and said he was disappointed with the experience.

He found that the classroom materials did little to educate drilling students about the mechanics of well control and believed that this has negatively affected drilling performance in the real world.

“I was a little bit appalled. It had not changed much in 30 years and I would have expected it to evolve,” he said of the exam. “The criticism with well control training now is that they are teaching to pass the quiz. It is not ‘Why is this question asked this way?’ It is ‘Here is the question and here is the answer.’”

David Price, CEO of IWCF, responded. “In 2009, ahead of Macondo, we recognized that some training providers were teaching to pass an exam, which is absolutely unacceptable. We started to make changes and Macondo acted as a further catalyst to ensure that this could not happen. We increased our audits and have removed accreditation from centers when necessary.”

“While progress has been made since the IOGP recommendations, as an industry we must not rest on our laurels, but push for continual improvement. That is why we reviewed the syllabus and have been focusing on improving the technical content and setting up our technical task forces, led by industry people,” he said.

“We launched a pilot earlier this year in crew resource management, designed to encourage a change in attitude to raise awareness of human factors in well operations. Several IWCF-accredited training centers are running the pilot scheme, including BP America in Houston, Maersk Training in Denmark, and Shell and the Well Academy in the Netherlands,” Price said.

A Focus on Physical Barriers

For Daniel Fraser, a program director in the Energy and Global Security Directorate of the Argonne National Laboratory, a renewed focus on physical barriers is critical. The idea is that if physical barriers are not broken, then there should be no major well control incidents.

As the leader of a process safety team, with expertise in the nuclear industry, whose Macondo was Chernobyl, Fraser has just finished writing his second SPE paper on upstream safety analysis. It is to be delivered at the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in Houston in September. The first installment was presented at the recent SPE/IADC Drilling Conference and Exhibition in London.

Understanding what is required for the proper performance of physical barriers, such as tubulars, cement, and fluid columns, offers a basis for analyzing what is wrong when they do not hold up. “The point is you pay attention to your physical barriers,” Fraser said.

Fraser’s goal is to provide tools so that the industry can use a problem-solving approach called a success path in its training programs. “What do I need to be successful at maintaining my barriers? It is a key approach to understanding risks,” he said.

“Earlier this year, we launched a new training standard in drilling and well intervention for top-achieving candidates to drive up competency standards. The content is based on real industry well control incidents involving simulated exercises, teamwork, and peer-to-peer review. We want to encourage candidates to strive to be the best and to challenge them in new ways. We are making strides, but we also need operators, contractors, and training providers to get behind the changes,” he said.

The previous certification programs were also seen as not providing enough well control training for specialized operations and new drilling technology. In turn, the 2012 IOGP report said new courses about hydrogen sulfide-containing wells, complex completion designs, and managed pressure drilling (MPD) should be adopted.

In regards to MPD, the report said new training was needed to cover the conflicts that the technology may introduce with traditional well control equipment and techniques.

Ziegler said he has worked on projects where rig crews ignored instructions from the MPD specialist on the rig because they were inadequately trained to use the technology and ended up reverting to traditional well control methodology.

Other areas the report said needed to be covered include narrow margin drilling, underbalanced drilling, and near balance drilling.

The IWCF is in the process of adopting these recommendations, which also call for a minimum of 8 hours of classroom or online courses. The IADC said it too is in the process of drafting new materials concerning MPD well control.

Engineers Needed Offshore

In most cases, the engineers who design deepwater wells do not oversee the projects from the rig as they once did. Aird’s view is that as companies moved away from flying engineers offshore, it has created a growing disconnect between well planning and well execution.

With engineers onboard, it is believed they could work closer with drillers on how to handle the complications and changes in plan often encountered in deepwater operations.

By gaining field experience, the engineers would also be in a better position to learn best practices, which Aird said becomes easier to forget the more time one spends away from the rig.

“I can see that people don’t understand the basics anymore,” he said of his most recent experiences working offshore. “We have a generation of graduates who have come into the industry in the last 10 years, who, still to this day, lack knowledge and experience because they have never been afforded the opportunity by management to get to the rig.”

Ziegler said US Gulf of Mexico operators are particularly reluctant to send engineers onto a rig and generally only do so when drilling is in the later-stage development mode, as opposed to the more challenging exploratory mode. “Otherwise, they need them in the office because they have to do [approval for expenditure requests], well designs, casing designs, you name it,” he said.

Deepwater Wells Can Forgive

Much of the discussion on the need for better training and education is based on the argument that too many avoidable mistakes are being made in complex drilling environments. So why has another Macondo not occurred since 2010?

The primary reason is because deepwater wells are relatively forgiving. By all accounts, deepwater wells are technically challenging to drill, but they are not a hair trigger away from disaster. Citing one of his mentors, Abel said, “If you want to have a blowout, you have to work at it.”

The final report released in 2011 by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling offers a detailed account of the series of engineering and procedural failures that led to the loss of well control. In summary, the report concluded that, “The well blew out because a number of separate risk factors, oversights, and outright mistakes combined to overwhelm the safeguards meant to prevent just such an event from happening.”

While it laid much of the blame on management and poor communication between the companies involved in the well’s construction, the report said that the engineers and rig crew were most likely untrained on how to respond to the well control event that led to the blowout. Also, the engineers involved failed to realize the impact of ad hoc changes made to the well plan.

Without the training or experience to identify the well control problems hours and days ahead of time, the report documented how the rig crew perceived the influx of hydrocarbons in the riser as occurring suddenly and without warning. Ziegler said, “In reality, that volume increase happened many hours before and what they saw was just the last-minute gas expansion at the top of the riser.”

Putting Macondo aside, he added that there are also times when crews follow the textbook well control procedures and still suffer a blowout during specialized operations, such as dual-gradient drilling. Visual flow checks of drilling fluids remain an industry standard practice for verifying a well’s stability, despite the fact that they cannot always be trusted for complex wells.

“The Third World War may have started a few thousand feet down and you will not see anything at surface,” Ziegler said. He cited examples where blowouts occurred during visual flow checks offshore Southeast Asia.

In those cases, the fluid levels remained static, but inside the well, “there was a massive exchange of fluid going down and gas coming up and that dynamic situation kept the top fluid column floating on top of” the wild action happening inside the well, he said. “The thing is, we get away with a lot of stuff that could become Macondo.”

An example he said worth following is Shell’s program to develop college graduates into drilling engineers through a rigorous series of structured courses, self-study, and hands-on training that can take up to 5 years to complete. “The drilling engineer needs to be a mechanical engineer, but he also needs to be a petroleum engineer because he is constructing the well and the well is the reservoir access,” he said.

Ziegler, who took this program during his 16 years at Shell, said what is known as a “Round 2” certificate is issued upon completion. The certificate is accepted by the University of Houston and the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen as a prerequisite for a master’s degree in drilling engineering.

Importance of Simulators

Another path to improvement being discussed involves taking a page from how the aviation industry trains commercial airline pilots. Regardless of seniority, the pilots must take regular in-flight tests and spend hours in simulators to ensure that they remain up to the task of flying passengers. For each airport they intend to fly to, they must first simulate the landing. The analogy for deepwater drilling would be to simulate a well program before rigging up.

And perhaps most important, commercial pilots must simulate a variety of dangerous scenarios to prove that they will react properly in the face of an emergency. “We don’t do that with the drilling guys,” Abel said. “They are underpaid and undereducated for the amount of exposure they can create” on the most complex and expensive wells.

As Abel explained, in both the deepwater drilling and aviation scenarios, life and property are at stake. However, what separates offshore drilling is that a subsea blowout can result in significant environmental damage. The financial costs can also be extreme. The cumulative toll for the companies involved in the Macondo incident has soared past USD 45 billion.

The experts said that based on this recent history, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine a future subsea blowout so severe that it could force an operator into bankruptcy. All the more reason to invest more money and time into the driller, they said. “The driller is making all the relevant decisions that can bring a company down,” Ziegler emphasized.

“We may think we have a structured environment on a rig, but we are always facing significant uncertainty from the geology and from the well even in the development scenario,” he added. “That means the driller must be a lot better than the airline pilot, because the driller in his daily life faces a much higher level of uncertainty.”

And while the aviation industry has relied heavily on flight simulators for decades, the drilling industry has only recently begun to embrace such technology. Aird estimated that drillers spend about 1% of their time working on a simulator.

There are signs that this situation might be changing. In February, BP announced a 5-year contract with Maersk Training to train integrated offshore drilling teams. Next year, a Maersk facility will open in Houston where BP and its contractors will be able to undergo an “immersive simulation environment” that will include scenario-based training.

Aird has seen the results of this type of training that involves not just the driller, but also the well engineers and other key personnel. “When they go out to the rig, they don’t make these basic mistakes, and they are costly mistakes,” that run into the tens of millions of dollars, he said.

On his most recent drilling operation that used the simulate-first approach, Aird said the resulting well was drilled without suffering a major issue. As for the quality of the well, he compared it to a gun barrel—in other words, about as good as it gets.