CRITICAL ISSUES IN DRILLING & COMPLETIONS
We have made significant progress in
deploying technologies that effectively
automate the process of drilling, and that
eliminates the variability and inconsis-
tencies that come with human beings
making decisions. You may not get the
highest level of efficiency from day one of
deploying a technology, but you will get
consistency and repeatability. Over time as
that technology is optimized, you will start
to gain efficiency. Technology deployment
is a journey, and how people consume that
technology at the rig is really what will
make it either a success or a failure.
So will humans always be needed at
the rig site, even in a highly autono-
mous drilling operation?
Nabors’ X29 rig has been retrofi tted with the Canrig RZR and has drilled multiple
wells for ExxonMobil in the Permian Basin.
collaborate with each other to deploy solu-
tions that are mutually beneficial.
This seems like a big shift away from
15-20 years ago, when contractors pri-
marily developed technologies or
equipment for their own rigs.
Absolutely, it’s a big shift, but it’s neces-
sary. Technology today evolves at such
a quick pace, and it requires significant
investments, so we can’t all invest in
everything while maintaining financial
discipline. Each drilling contractor has
a unique value proposition, so we really
don’t need to compete on everything. Find
your niche, find where you can prosper
and outsource the rest – that way every-
body can be successful.
Where do you think the next step
changes in efficiency on your rigs are
going to come from?
In today’s drilling operations, between
stuck pipes and BHAs that are lost due to
twist-offs, well control and other safety
issues, the industry loses hundreds of mil-
lions of dollars. The step change in effi-
ciency is going to come from how we can
eliminate those drilling dysfunctions in
real time while we are drilling.
30 Drilling contractors’ focus has been to
optimize connection and tripping speeds,
which are valuable, but those are simpler
problems to solve. The bigger problems
still remain, and they will require sig-
nificant collaboration with customers. By
applying data science and other digital
solutions, we can create a loop of continu-
ous improvement. This will allow for bet-
ter planning because we can choose better
drilling parameters, and it will help in the
execution of the drilling roadmap. Further,
when something unplanned happens, it
will allow us to course-correct and quickly
push out new parameters to the rig.
Why do you think we haven’t been
able to achieve this before?
First, we were very reliant on experi-
enced people to mitigate risks. Second, the
industry was not using technologies like
edge or cloud computing or algorithms for
real-time analytics. Those technologies
exist now thanks to investments from a
lot of technology firms, and we are able
to adopt them to create our own digital
ecosystem. Can you talk about the progress
Nabors has made in eliminating the
drilling dysfunctions you mentioned ?
I believe so, although the skill sets of the
humans will be different. When Nabors
launched our newly built autonomous rig,
R801, and when we fully automated an
existing rig with our new robotics upgrade,
the crew sizes were still the same, but we
had more software people on the rig. There
will always be decisions that need to be
made in real time, and I don’t think arti-
ficial intelligence has advanced to such a
level that they can be taken by machines
completely. What would you say are the key
enablers to seeing more automation
at scale across our industry?
They need to be modular, rig agnostic and
capital light. As with anything groundbreak-
ing, the cost of development is high. For
something like that to be a success at scale,
the cost – both to the manufacturer and to
the customer – needs to come down. There
will also need to be a mindset shift, where
organizations recognize that they want to
use the technology, whether they developed
it or not, because it improves performance
and HSE, and they have to be willing to go
through the required learning curve.
Do you see increasing demand from
operators for these types of automa-
tion technologies?
Absolutely. We have deployed our pro-
cess and machine automation technolo-
gies across our fleet and for various rig
JAN UARY/FEB RUARY 2023 • D R I LLI N G CO N T R ACTO R