Deploying AI on non-drilling parts of well construction could be next automation frontier

By Stephen Whitfield, Senior Editor

Tyson Seeliger is VP of Eastern Hemisphere Operations at Nabors Industries.

What would you say are the biggest near-term challenges, both for Nabors specifically and for the drilling industry as a whole?

I don’t necessarily look at things as facing challenges, but more so as opportunities. Very rarely do you see every market or every region roaring at the same time. We have to be mobile and ready to shift our focus depending on where we see the best opportunities. So if you look at the market now, we’re seeing a rig count that has been flat to down over the last couple years; it’s been a slow trickle down. But if we look at historical trends, we know we may get another quick boom before it starts to go down again. 

It’s interesting that you bring up sort of flat markets in certain regions. Obviously, we’ve had downturns in the last few years, and the recovery from that hasn’t reached the high points we saw in the early 2010s. Are we just in a new reality with rig demand? Is this something that, as a company, you accept that we’re not going to see the pre-2014 days?

If you’re talking about the US, the answer to that is yes. If you’re talking about Argentina or Algeria, the answer is absolutely no. In other parts of the world outside of the US, we’re seeing what we saw back in 2010 to 2013, when we saw this really big ramp-up, and there are a lot of places in the world where we’re starting to see that happening now. Will it happen at the scale on which it happened in the United States and reach 1,200 to 1,400 rigs? No, but there are still plenty of opportunities out there.

Additionally, if you look at Nabors’ strategy, we have other entities like Canrig and NDS that support not only Nabors but also third-party companies. This gives us an advantage because, even if the market is flat from a rig count perspective, we have the ability to deploy capital equipment, automation technologies and energy transition solutions that allow us to continue to grow. 

Capital discipline has been an industry maxim in recent years, even as the markets recover from past downturns. How can the industry as a whole, and maybe Nabors as a company, balance the need for capital discipline with the need for continued investment in new technologies to push the industry forward?

Of course, sometimes we have to make tough decisions around whether something is strategic versus necessary. From a technology standpoint, we have to see if they’re add-ons to the rigs or if we need to do them. 

If we have experience implementing that technology in, say, North America, it’s easier for us to do the same somewhere else because we already understand what to do. If we’re able to do it in a cost-effective manner that can potentially help generate additional profits or perhaps help improve dayrates in the future, these are the things that we’re going to talk about.

In the same way that an oil and gas company decides which field they’re going to develop first or which wells they’re going to drill first, not all opportunities are created equal for a drilling contractor like us. When it comes to capital discipline, we need to be very thoughtful about which opportunities we’re going to participate in and which opportunities we’re going to decline. This is something that we need to put a lot of thought into.

To that end, how important is collaboration with operators and with service companies in driving innovation within the industry? 

You can get a sense of that from some of the recent announcements we’ve made. We are collaborating with the likes of SLB and Halliburton to deploy our systems, and looking at the rig as the platform in order to drill faster and better wells. So we do see a lot of value in collaboration, and we use the technologies that we’re building, like SmartROS and others, to enable service companies to use their tools. In turn, that then gives us access to the operator and builds good relationships. 

Have there been any particular instances recently where you’ve worked with another company and used lessons learned from that collaboration to improve your own offerings?

A recent example is Predictive Drilling, which was a collaboration with Corva. Corva had developed a really nice model for improving ROP for our customers. Unfortunately, if you don’t have access to the control system, all you’re doing is flashing an alert to prompt the driller to change the set point. Whether the set point is changed is up to the driller. So we tied the model directly into the control system, so the set point is automatically changed without needing action from the driller.

I’d like to point out that our customers are doing these things because they know that it’s going to improve their consistency and reduce their well times. It has to be clear that automation is delivering results, or else nobody would be paying for it. 

From an international perspective, it’s about educating the current customer base about the benefits. Yes, there will be an incremental charge, but the amount of savings over time will far outweigh that cost by many multiples.

If you think about it in terms of factory drilling, it’s only just kicking off in the Middle East, and companies here are just starting to see the benefits. And there are a lot of other benefits that come with automation that are still unrecognized. For example, as the operating system of the rig, SmartROS is how we function the rig and how we troubleshoot the rig, and it’s tied directly to RigCLOUD.

As automation becomes more prevalent on the rig, where do you see the driller fitting in? Is automation there to enhance the role of the human on the rig or to eventually replace him or her?

The human has to be there, but going to an automated state does change the dynamics of the rig crew exponentially. They now have more time to maintain the rig, and we can help them build different skill sets because the rig is far more electric and far more computerized.

Let’s face it – technology isn’t perfect. If the rig has some kind of glitch, we’ve got to be able to intervene and control it. We need those people out there, in many different forms, to help take care of the rig. Over time, it will enable us to benefit from a downtime perspective. People who would normally be on the drill floor and in the red zone, having to handle pipe, now don’t have to do those things anymore and can look after safety and maintenance. That’s important with drilling moving at such a high speed. The crew can now be preparing for the next move or the next process, whether it be running cement or running casing, whatever it might be.

So, we still need people. How many? That’s still left to be figured out.

I’m sure your remote monitoring centers play into this, too.

That’s why we just built our new facility in Saudi Arabia, to help us with not only our activities there, but also with the greater Nabors fleet, whether it be in Kazakhstan, Papua New Guinea, Oman or Algeria. It makes it easier for us to enable the use of SmartNAV or other technologies on those rigs. 

Nabors has been highly active in the Middle East for years. What role do you see the region playing for your overall business?

The Middle East is core to our business. It’s been core to our business since 1990, when we made our first acquisition of Laughlin Brothers to enter the Saudi Arabia market. I think that, for others, it’s now becoming a core market that can help offset declines or potential slowdowns in other markets. 

For us, we’re going to see the evolution of taking what we’ve learned here as this market becomes more competitive. The future here is going to be a lot less capital intensive. It’s not going to be building new rigs. It’s going to be improving the rigs that we currently have – because we are in a capital discipline market – and it’s taking those technologies that we’ve used in other regions and bringing them here. 

It’s like if you were upgrading your computer, you could just go down and buy a new input, or we could buy maybe some more RAM and some more memory and make it better. There’s a lot of different things that we can do, but we see this market as that place to do that. 

And I think the advantage that we have is that, as I mentioned earlier, we’re enabling other companies’ rigs, not just our own. So we’re able to enter other tenders that are giving us a lot of knowledge about not only our own fleet, but also how to make other fleets better. 

At the end of the day, that’s not only an additional revenue stream for us, but it’s also making the industry better by helping other rigs perform better, and that helps to improve carbon efficiency.

So you don’t see other companies’ increased interest in the Middle East market as a bad thing for you?

No. We need our peers to be successful, as well. We need them to be successful with high-specification rigs and with technology, because we want our customers to value high-specification rigs and technology. There are plenty of rigs in the world, but there aren’t a ton of high-specification, automated rigs that are able to deliver such consistent results. We welcome our competitors and wish them success because, by having them here and proving the model that we’ve built, that’s going to allow technology to scale up in many different regions.

Additionally, the increased competition helps build and improve the local companies, which can help the operator realize more benefits. 

Going back to automation, Nabors has been at the forefront of developing solutions in this space. What would you say is the next frontier here? What further efficiencies do you think automated platforms can help unlock that they haven’t already?

There’s a couple answers to that question. First, a lot of the focus from an automation perspective has been around the drilling piece. A lot of the effort has been around automating sliding, automating connections, automating how we drill the stand down. We will continue to improve those products mainly by layering AI on top of existing products. We’re working on a variety of different AI packages that we can use to complement those products and deliver exponentially better results. That’s one component.

However, the industry has focused less time on the other parts that happen on a well and improving those flat times. Historically, we’ve used a drilling engineer or quarterly service quality meetings with our customers to really figure out what are the other flat times that we can reduce. But that’s a hard thing to scale, because often those flat times happen with hands and fingers and effort and manpower. 

We’re really putting a lot of thought and effort into our customers’ well programs, finding best practices through a product that we have called SmartPLAN; we’re working to scale that out fleetwide. And we’re seeing days of reduction on our current implementations of this new product. From a drilling perspective, it’s hard to get days shaved from on-bottom rotating because we’ve already made so many improvements. So, the next piece of attack is the other portions that happen on the well, improving those and then scaling that across the fleet.

When you say other portions of the well, what do you mean?

That refers to things like rig moves, casing-running times, working with our customer on how frequently are they reaming, how frequently they are cleaning the hole. For example, are they circulating less on another rig that isn’t having negative consequences to the wellbore? And can we take that learning and apply it to their other 10 rigs? We want to take all of the best practices we have, from the variety of rigs, put that into a system, develop roadmaps and then execute on that at scale. That is a very good opportunity.

I would think of it like Google Maps. If you plug in your destination, it’s going to give you the quickest way to get there. It’s already going to know the speed limits on that route, and it’s going to give you an alternate route that will take about the same time if that’s available. As you move along that route, it may redirect you based on other factors. In those terms, SmartPLAN tells us all those things in real time, so that we understand what’s happening. 

Keeping with that same analogy, the next frontier might be developing something that looks at my gas gauge and warns me if I’m about to run out of gas, and tells me where’s the first gas station. In a drilling context, we would be telling the driller what’s going to happen based on things that are already happening and based on things that have happened in the past.

If we can save 5 minutes doing something like this, that’s now 5 extra minutes I have for that next activity, whether that’s running casing or something else. That gives me an opportunity to recalculate and say, what else can I do?  Maybe I need to maintain my top drive with this extra time. 

What do you see as the biggest roadblocks to the widescale adoption of AI and machine learning-based systems on the rig?

If these technologies didn’t work or didn’t provide value, no one would be using it. A recent example of this adoption is from Saudi Arabia, where we had an award from Saudi Aramco to deploy our automation, both on Nabors and non-Nabors onshore and offshore rigs in the Kingdom. Obviously, there’s a significant scaling opportunity in the Kingdom, and we’re going to see this in other areas of the world. 

Nabors is also starting to showcase extended reality content. Where do you see that helping drillers?

It’s going to be huge for us from a training perspective. Once you put those glasses on, you can see the drill string or the top drive – you can see everything that’s happening. We can take apart a top drive together and do a lot of other things to help train our crews. 

From a larger perspective, it’s possible that this could help us remove the human-machine interfaces from our rigs. Maybe we can just use these glasses in our drillers cabins to collect data and execute functions. The driller is able to look down at the catwalk level and look at the crews bringing pipe up, or see the derrickman. 

Of course, this is pretty far out there in the future – we’re not going to see this anytime soon – but to us, this type of innovation is no different from what we’re seeing from our competitors.

Let’s talk about decarbonization. What role do you see the drilling contractor playing in helping to reduce the carbon footprint of drilling operations? What is Nabors doing in this area?

We have already developed some solutions that is seeing high demand. For instance, our PowerTAP system puts the rig on highline power. We can replace all of the lighting on the rig with LEDs and reduce our emissions. 

We can build smart programs to use engines more efficiently, so that we’re not burning as much diesel. If we drill the well faster, that inherently takes us off the location faster, and that helps reduce our carbon footprint.

Back to your earlier point about capital discipline, our customers are not going to frivolously use their cash for something that isn’t going to have a return. So the things that we’ve focused on, from an energy transition perspective, are things that not only reduce carbon footprint but also provide savings. 

PowerTAP is a very good example of that, where we are both reducing the overall carbon emissions and providing significant savings to our customers from a Scope 1 and Scope 2 perspective. 

Lastly, you’ve mentioned the demand for high-spec rigs. What components do you think are must-haves for a rig, regardless of the region?

From an operational perspective, you need to have a rig that can move quickly. In some areas, that means stompers for walking from pad to pad. In some areas, that may mean rolling gears to wheel the rig from one location to another. In some areas, that may be reducing the size of your loads to fit on the back of a truck to go from one spot to another. But having a rig that can be incredibly mobile is one important component. 

Rigs are going to have varying requirements as it relates to hookload, drawworks and even pump pressures. In the US, I think we have a pretty ingrained standard of what a high-specification rig is. Looking more globally, the specifics of horsepower and other components will vary a little bit. But I would say that, regardless of the size of your rig, you need to look at automation and cost saving opportunities through the energy transition solutions. Without those things, it is clear that you are not going to operate as efficiently.

Even aside from automation, we also need to think about the mechanization on our rigs. They’re not the same, but they’re equally important components. We need increased mechanization for the safety of our people and for the efficiency of the wells we drill. That can be mechanized pipe handling, catwalks, wrenches or top drives that have built-in automated components. 

You also need to look at horsepower rating. For the rigs we’re running in the US, our PACE-X rigs are 3,000 hp at the drawworks, and the hookload is well over 750,000 lb. That gives us the flexibility to deliver more hydraulic horsepower from the rig to the wellbore, and it gives us the flexibility to convert to 7,500 psi. 

Finally, I also think remote monitoring is critically important. Nabors’ RigCLOUD platform allows us to be able to look inside the rig and monitor our KPIs. It allows us to get into the VFDs of the AC rig, troubleshoot and instantly create an end-of-well report from a phone.

For us, those are things that have become standard. DC