automation

Drilling relies on complex webs of wired machines generating enormous amounts of data that need to be shared. But getting the appropriate data in the right hands is a problem.

What are the real opportunities for disruptive step change that will help us to catch up and leapfrog other industries that have given rise to companies such as Amazon, Google, and Apple, and have driven the renewal of the auto, airline, and transportation industries?

Software that offers turn-by-turn directions for drilling a horizontal well could drastically reduce the number of directional drillers.

A new spread of stimulation equipment from the world’s largest service company demonstrates the latest significant step to creating a more automated oilfield.

Many column inches are filled with discussion of how companies need to operate in the lower-for-longer market that the upstream oil and gas industry continues to face.

The tedium of identifying small faults in often murky seismic images pushed Dustin Dewett, an associate geophysicist for BHP Billiton, to develop a better way to use the tools at hand.

The Samarang oil field, offshore Sabah, Malaysia, is undergoing a redevelopment project with integrated operations. Several work flows were designed and deployed in order to achieve an early milestone of providing real-time well-performance monitoring, surveillance, and optimization.

On the basis of safety performance results achieved through automation downstream, an operator set out to achieve the same advances in its upstream business.

The drilling-systems-automation roadmap (DSA-R) initiative is a cross-industry effort launched in June 2013 to help accelerate the adoption of advancements in drilling-systems automation (DSA) for both onshore and offshore wells.

Case studies from around the world prove that big rewards await companies that optimize the artificial lift systems keeping their mature fields alive. The success stories involve a mix of monitoring, automation, and performance tracking.