CRITICAL ISSUES IN DRILLING & COMPLETIONS
Open architecture, end-to-end
solutions can help to advance
industry’s digital journey
Aker BP working to create full loop for autonomous
drilling and new business models with alliance partners
as it prepares for a lower-margin future
Tommy Sigmundstad, Senior VP Drilling
and Wells, Aker BP
BY LINDA HSIEH, EDITOR & PUBLISHER
Tommy Sigmundstad is Senior VP Drilling
and Wells for Aker BP.
What do you see as the biggest chal-
lenges for the global drilling industry?
Ever since the market crashed back in
2014, the service sector in particular has
been surviving, more or less, on fumes.
That is going to impact us today as activ-
ity picks up significantly because, as an
operator, we rely on the service sector
to deliver on the projects. But with the
pace of the increase we’ve seen, and the
experience from before 2014, there is great
potential for quality problems due to a
lack of resources and competent people.
That would drive cost and delivery times
up, and might end up driving safety in the
wrong direction.
One competent person cannot be
replaced by several less competent indi-
viduals. That will only drive up cost, and
the quality of the projects will suffer. I
think that’s the biggest challenge.
What about all the work the industry
has done on automation? Is that not
helping with this challenge?
We’re not far along enough though.
Neither digital planning nor automation
has allowed us to cut back on resources
yet. We still sit on the same crews and
same number of drilling engineers.
So what value are you able to see now
with automation and digital?
22 We’re focusing now on what I call flow
efficiency, which means we can do things
faster. Digital, in particular, is helping us
because we now have better access to
the data we need. Our engineers don’t
have to go searching for the data in differ-
ent databases or Excel spreadsheets. This
means they can spend more time building
robustness and quality into our well plans.
Overall, yes, automation and digital will
help with reducing our resource needs for
planning and executing projects, but there
is still a lot of work to do.
Automation has hardly started. Some
of the service companies are offering
sequences for things like tripping and
connections, but you still need a driller to
sit there and watch it.
That is not solved yet, and it’s a big
challenge. At Aker BP, we are getting to
that stage now. Like everybody else, we
have digital twins and automatic drilling
controls, but to actually get an entire loop,
we still have some more work that we
need to do.
I think we can be there within five to
10 years, but we need to have the full loop
where we can break down the drilling
plan into commands and have it inter-
act with the rig-floor machinery. When
we can have a digital twin programming
machines, that’s when we can have real
autonomy. What are the remaining barriers to
getting to that point where resource
needs can be reduced?
With the APIs you mentioned, do you
see those being standardized for the
whole industry?
I think the challenge is that we need an
ecosystem. When we have a digital twin,
it’s static. It’s the plan. The minute we
start drilling and getting real-time data,
that static twin becomes a dynamic twin.
But just updating the drilling data piece
doesn’t help. We also need the formation
data, the pressures – everything we need
to update the subsurface model, which
again needs to inform the drilling plan.
We need a digital ecosystem where all
the various types of data can talk to each
other through APIs (application program-
ming interfaces). We will need to have that
ecosystem in place before we can really do
autonomous drilling.
We want open architecture and open
source. Yes, we want APIs that are com-
mon for the industry. One of my biggest
fears is that bigger companies will use
this for their competitive advantage, and
they will either make silos or vertically
integrate. I don’t think that’s the solu-
tion. The pockets of oil and gas that we’re
drilling for are going to become smaller, so
we need to focus more on cost. This means
we need to work together and lift this chal-
lenge as an industry. If every company
just goes about their own way of doing it,
it will just drive cost up, and it will take
more time.
Any timeline in mind?
JAN UARY/FEB RUARY 2023 • D R I LLI N G CO N T R ACTO R