The challenges of the drilling industry, technology advances, and the improvements needed to meet growing global oil demand in a safe, environmentally sound manner were the center of attention at the 25th SPE/IADC Drilling Conference held 5–7 March in Amsterdam.
A final attendance of 2,079 was the highest since the record level of 2,113 in 2007, a clear sign of the industry’s return to strength since the 2008–2009 global economic downturn. This year’s attendance was the second highest in conference history.
In 18 technical sessions, the conference covered a full slate of subjects including deepwater drilling; wellbore placement; drilling automation; early detection and well control; managed pressure and underbalanced drilling; and health, safety, and environment. A total of 102 papers were presented, selected from more than 350 abstracts, and there were 28 ePoster presentations.
The exhibition featured displays by 128 organizations, providing attendees the opportunity to see and discuss the latest in equipment, services, and other resources supporting the global exploration and production industry. In addition, a Young Professionals luncheon featured keynote speaker Eric van Oort, Lancaster Professor in Petroleum Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, who addressed “The Great Crew Change.”
ImageDelivering Wells
“Delivering Wells in a Critical World” was the theme of the conference plenary session on 6 March. Moderator Ole Slorer, director of global oilfield services at Morgan Stanley Research, framed the industry’s challenge over the next 7 years. The drilling sector will need to bring on 27 million BOPD of new production to meet expected world demand by 2020, with most of the increase anticipated to come from fields already discovered. The biggest contributors will be deepwater fields, particularly those in ultradeepwater, and liquids-rich shale formations in North America, he said.
Environmental risk and rising costs will put increasing pressure on drillers, and projects will become more complex, Slorer said. In addition, the world’s floating offshore drilling rig fleet will need to expand from 300 today to about 500 by 2020. Is the industry “ready for this challenge?” he asked.
What the Public Really Wants
Dew ranked the four biggest concerns for drilling contractors before the Macondo blowout: to prevent loss of life, loss of the rig, loss of revenue caused by equipment damage, and pollution. While working hard to prevent pollution, he noted that potential pollution originating from the contractor’s domain, above the wellhead, is much smaller than that originating from the operator’s domain, below the wellhead in the reservoir.
Dew contrasted these priorities with the public’s view of them after Macondo. Preventing pollution, he said, was “absolutely far and away the biggest concern” for the public, followed by loss of life. Loss of the rig rated much lower. “Frankly, I don’t think that the general public cares … as long as we are invisible,” Dew said. Loss of revenue caused by equipment damage, he concluded, does not concern the public, “only our shareholders.”
Diamond Offshore began to focus on achieving the kind of operational invisibility that Dew described after an explosion and fire killed 15 workers at a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, in 2005. Reporting on the incident in 2007, a panel headed by former US Secretary of State James A. Baker III concluded that the companies involved “concentrated too much on personnel safety and not enough on process safety,” Dew said.
The report led the company to re-examine the priorities of its safety program and shift some of the attention that it had been giving to preventing occurrences such as slips, trips, and falls toward more fully ensuring the safety of its major processes. The company adopted a process safety program premised on what an offshore drilling contractor must do to prevent multiple fatalities on the rig: preserve rig stability, maintain well control, and avoid the need to put people in lifeboats on the ocean.
The program’s goals are summarized as “keep the pointy end (the derrick) up, keep the hydrocarbons where they belong, and don’t give up the ship.” The role of every crew member down to roustabout and roughneck is defined so that everyone knows how their work supports and realizes those goals, Dew said.
International Safety Initiatives
Øyvind Tuntland, vice president of Norway’s Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA), discussed ongoing drilling safety initiatives of the International Regulators Forum (IRF) and North Sea Offshore Authorities Forum (NSOAF). The PSA is involved in both.
The IRF embraces regulatory authorities from the North Sea producing countries, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United States and is engaged with several other industry and global safety organizations. Although Tuntland said that the industry has a bright future, he noted that efforts within the IRF to develop global standards for improving blowout preventers have moved slowly. “So far, we have not seen the progress we have expected,” he said.
Tuntland also discussed some focus areas that have emerged from multinational audits conducted by the NSOAF, including drilling industry competence and capacity. Some 4,000 new offshore drilling crew members must be trained in the next few years to replace experienced personnel leaving the workforce and meet expanding industry needs. Crew-based simulations training will be an essential tool to achieve this, he said.
ImageEnhancing Process Safety
Scott Sigurdson, vice president of deep water area wells in BP’s global wells organization, discussed process safety. “We are working to continue to strengthen the way that we manage risk for the life of our wells from spud to abandonment,” he said. Process safety builds upon the disciplines of personal safety to enhance risk management, as in designing the well system barriers and layers of protection to ensure safe operations and making sure they are working, Sigurdson said.
“Process safety requires that we act as one team,” he said. “We define our operations as being systematically in control when things are documented, well understood and practiced, when there is clear accountability in place, when competencies are defined and demonstrated, and finally when conformance is assured.”
Drillers Now More Visible
Orr focused on the role of evolving technology and personnel competency in ensuring operational integrity. Technology has made enormous advances in enabling the identification of risks. As more risks, especially near-hazardous situations, are reported in an organization, awareness builds and the chances of a catastrophic incident decline, he said.
The next step is to improve an employee’s competency to a level, confirmable by the organization, that empowers him or her acting individually to stop an unsafe act, Orr said. Schlumberger is focused on the development of corporate standards and the combination of theoretical and hands-on training by which employee competencies can be certified.
Corporate standards also can define areas of responsibility among multiple participants in a project, including third parties, “to ensure that we have accountability, but on top of that we can manage, which is the biggest risk—the change management aspect of it,” Orr said.
He emphasized the need to understand the complexity of the whole drilling system and the interdependency of constituent parts that reflect the involvement of multiple stakeholders. “It is a system approach that is going to make the next step change,” Orr said, “and not only the introduction of new discrete-type services and products.”
Stakeholder Management, Responsibility
In Petronas’ well design integrity assurance program, all well designs undergo technical peer review, and high-pressure/high-temperature downhole systems designed by third parties receive independent committee review, Hamzah said.