CRITICAL ISSUES IN DRILLING & COMPLETIONS
Renewed focus on safety needed
as industry deals with labor
shortage amid activity ramp-up
Inflation and supply chain are also creating challenges,
but communication and transparency between
operator and contractor can help both parties
Bonnie Black, VP Drilling, Pioneer Natural
Resources BY LINDA HSIEH, EDITOR & PUBLISHER
Bonnie Black is VP Drilling at Pioneer
Natural Resources.
What do you see as the biggest chal-
lenges that the global drilling industry
currently faces?
Supply chain and inflation are certainly
impacting all operators, but I would say
Pioneer is doing a good job of navigat-
ing these challenges because of our long-
standing partnerships with our contrac-
tors and suppliers. These partnerships
have allowed us to dampen the effects
of inflation, as well as keep our supplies
secure. Pioneer plans to run between 24-26 rigs
in 2023, so we’ve also been able to leverage
our size and scale, but I strongly believe it’s
our deep partnerships that have been criti-
cal to our success. As the headwinds come,
we’re able to approach them with open
communication and honest discussions
about the risks and challenges.
Another challenge that may be a bit
more specific to the US or the Permian
Basin is the labor issue. All industries are
seeking labor, not just oil and gas. And
we’re all looking for the same people – the
ones we can rely on to show up, not just
today but the next day and the next hitch.
But unlike other industries, the oil and
gas industry is facing a double whammy
because we already had a gap in labor dat-
ing back to the downturn in 2014 and even
further back to the 1980s. Moreover, a lot of
our more experienced employees are now
looking to retire. All this combined means
that we are seeing a lot more short-service
14 employees (SSE’s) on location. These can
be individuals new to our industry, to a
certain location or to that specific job. It’s
not uncommon today to have 30% SSE’s on
a drilling location.
This has created challenges in safety,
and it’s something that we will have to
address as an industry. At Pioneer, one
way we’re addressing this is by continu-
ing to shift the way we approach safety.
We’ve left the days of incident-based safe-
ty culture behind and are moving toward
a more risk-based culture. That means
we’re focusing less on what happened in
the past and much more on what could
happen in the future. We are looking more
closely at what risks are out there, what
we can prevent, and how we can further
engineer people out of the line of fire.
find that our two wellsite supervisors on
each rig – day and night – are going to be
very different from each other. One will
be a seasoned supervisor who has great
instincts about what’s going to happen on
that well. The other will be a lot younger,
and he or she might be a degreed engi-
neer who is very well versed in cutting-
edge technology. This gives us the best of
both worlds, combining experience and an
eagerness for technology adoption.
Then, on top of that, we give them sup-
port through a remote command center.
They don’t oversee or direct the rigs – they
support them. These centers are staffed
with even more diversity, including a sea-
soned superintendent as well as teams of
engineers, operational geologists, direc-
tional drillers and data scientists.
What are your views on the industry’s
efforts to adopt new technologies,
particularly around digital and auto-
mation? Can you talk a bit more about how
Pioneer is using digital technologies to
improve your drilling operations?
I see our industry making a lot of strides
with drilling automation and integrating
those technologies with big data to drive
increased efficiency. This is really helping
to support our field personnel, especially
the new workers.
Of course, technology brings its own
challenges. Rolling out a new technology
across a rig fleet is never straightforward.
On Pioneer’s rigs, we’ve adopted a lot of
diversity to help with these efforts. I’m
not talking about gender or ethnic diver-
sity but rather diversity in experience,
education and job responsibilities. You’ll
We are very much focused on using
digital technologies to make what we call
data-driven decisions. We have built live
algorithms that leverage real-time data
from our wells to give alerts to our person-
nel. These can be alerts for potential stuck
pipe or hole-cleaning issues, for example.
We’ve also built physics-based models that
show us things like offset parameters and
torque and drag analyses – all designed
to help us make real-time decisions while
drilling. Over time, we believe efforts like
these can help us to take our lower-per-
forming rigs and match their performance
to our best-performing ones.
JAN UARY/FEB RUARY 2023 • D R I LLI N G CO N T R ACTO R
CRITICAL ISSUES IN DRILLING & COMPLETIONS
TOP With plans to run 24-26 rigs this
year, Pioneer will leverage both its scale
and supplier partnerships to address
supply chain and infl ation challenges.
BOTTOM Pioneer is pairing seasoned
employees with newer ones to supervise
its rigs, which the company believes
helps to combine experience and an
eagerness for technology adoption.
Are you looking at technologies that
could help Pioneer achieve com-
pletely autonomous drilling?
Automation is a journey. In the near
term, we’re focused more on improving
efficiency and safety rather than auton-
omous drilling. There are many, many
technologies out there; you can’t adopt all
of them all at the same time. We have to
figure out which ones are a right fit for our
operation and which ones will really make
a difference in efficiency. It doesn’t mean
that we won’t adopt more of them later, but
you have to have a priority.
With that said, I believe we have built
a strong foundation, particularly on the
people side with our subject matter experts.
Like I mentioned with our command cen-
ters, we’re putting together very diverse
teams so they can play off of one another’s
expertise and technological backgrounds to
improve efficiencies. I think that’s what is
making drilling exciting again, and we’ve
not yet seen the limits of what we can do.
Going back to what you said earlier
about having deep, long-standing
relationships with your contractors
and suppliers – can you talk about
Pioneer’s approach to building rela-
tionships like that?
One of the things that we are very proud
of is that we approach those vendor rela-
tionships as true partnerships. We are as
transparent as possible with our plans so
that they can also plan their work. We
recognize that, in order for them to help us
deliver on our projects, they have to know
what we need from them and when, with
some surety.
Communication and transparency are
paramount, and that involves having con-
versations early and often. If there is
potential for our plans to change, we com-
municate that with them. At the same
time, if our vendors are having challenges
around supply chain or labor, there is
enough trust in our relationship that they
can tell us upfront, and we can try to
solve those issues together as early as
possible. There seems to be a bigger focus on
energy security now than we’ve seen
in perhaps decades. Do you see this
as a potential turning point for the oil
and gas industry? What can we do to
turn this into an opportunity to renew
our image among either investors or
next-generation talent?
Without a doubt, there’s been a huge
focus on energy security. People are talk-
ing a lot more about the energy supply
and demand dynamic and whether this
is completely a product of the Russia/
Ukraine war. I think that’s been good for
our society because it has brought energy
security to the forefront. We’ve had limited
investment in the oil and gas space for
several years, so we definitely have some-
thing to prove to our investors.
I believe we have to continue to show
that we are strong investments that focus
on returning free cash flow and a strong
return of capital. That is certainly a key
focus for us at Pioneer.
While we’re seeing a recovery in the
onshore drilling market, it seems
unlikely that many new rigs will be built
soon. So what upgrades to existing
rigs and equipment would you like to
see in the next few years?
Q&A with Bonnie Black, Pioneer,
continued on page 31
D R I LLI N G CO N T R ACTO R • JAN UARY/FEB RUARY 2023
15