Halliburton shares optimization philosophy via webcast from Drilling Conference
In a live webcast from the exhibit floor of the 2011 SPE/IADC Drilling Conference in Amsterdam on 2 March, Halliburton announced “a step-change in drilling that is bringing significant results for customers and changing the face of the industry as we know it.”
The company took the opportunity to share a process with the public that Halliburton has been delivering to customers for years. The organization has undergone a transformation through the integration of drilling services and software platforms. According to Laura Schwinn, vice president of drill bits and services for Halliburton, the reason behind the move is that the industry is changing, and customers are moving away from just looking at individual prices for products and services and are looking at the quality, as well as the efficiency, of drilling by reducing NPT and increasing performance. Customers are looking at reducing the overall cost of well construction.
Halliburton intends to deliver on these customer requirements through optimized drilling performance in the context of overall wellbore construction. The requirements of optimized drilling performance, according to Ms Schwinn, include the right technology to deliver a well anywhere in the world, integrated drilling software, collaboration (virtually, physically and behaviorally) and an engineered workflow. The company has been working to define and implement the workflow portion of the optimization process over the past two years.
“I think we too often confuse problem-solving with optimization. Optimization requires that we re-examine issues so that we can come up with new and innovative solutions to push back that performance envelope,” Jez Greenwood, chief global technical adviser for Halliburton, said. “We also realize that when we’re optimizing drilling, we have to link together all parts of our service delivery. Obviously the details in this workflow are very complex. What our drilling workflow does is map out all of these interrelationships so that we can align all of our people, processes and technologies to understand the very iterative nature of the planning process.”
The collaborative environment is leveraged to deliver value and drive efficiency through the wellbore construction process. In one recent project in Norway, the customer was looking for a step-change in drilling performance from a fully integrated project. Halliburton said it help to deliver a 99.2% efficiency rate on the project, compared with an average of 80%.
