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




CRITICAL ISSUES IN DRILLING & COMPLETIONS
Can you give us a couple of examples
of digital projects where Aker BP has
seen value?
We put a strategy in place around digital
back in 2017-2018. It was a very simple
plan revolving around the ecosystem I
mentioned earlier — planning a well in a
day and automation. So far, we have devel-
oped the planning piece – we have what
we call collaborative well planning (CWP),
which digitizes the interface between the
subsurface and our Drilling & Wells group,
along with the digital well program. This
gives us a digital twin.

We’re using that in two instances. First,
we take a tactical approach. For example,
in one well we were drilling, we didn’t
manage to follow the planned trajecto-
ry, and the team believed they needed
to go back and sidetrack. But then they
put together a CWP session, where they
worked closely with the subsurface team
to visualize all the various options. They
were able to come up with an alternative
plan that saved around 70 million NOK,
which is roughly $8 to $9 million.

Secondly, we now use the CWP software
on all the PDOs we submit, which allows
us to deliver the well plans within a much
shorter time frame. Moreover, the plans
are much more robust than before – I
believe the improved quality of our plans
will result in large savings without me
knowing any specific number. But it is a
large number.

I will add that we jointly developed
both of these pieces of software with
our alliance partner Halliburton. We work
very closely with them to develop new
software that we can put into our opera-
tions at Aker BP. This type of collaboration
streamlines the process for beta testing
new technology, and they can quickly
scale it and make it available to other
operators. So you’re open to sharing technolo-
gies with other operators?
Yes, the software is open architecture.

So, when those other companies start
developing their apps and digital solutions,
we can use them, as well. Like I said, we
need to lift this challenge together as an
industry because it’s going to be expensive
Odfjell Drilling is one of Aker BP’s several alliance partners. Through alliances, Aker BP
says it is working to build relationships based on trust that will allow both operator
and drilling contractor to reduce cost and, in turn, create more work opportunities.

to develop these types of software and put
them in use.

We have actually met with several other
operators already, like Hess, Shell and
ConocoPhillips. We are sharing because
we don’t see this as a competitive advan-
tage. How we use the tools and interpret
the data — that’s the competitive advan-
tage, not having the tools at hand.

Do you see the industry embracing
the digital mindset as much as we
need to?
I think we are at Aker BP, but I’m not
sure about the rest of the industry. In
many instances, I see the mindset of peo-
ple is still a barrier. Especially when it
comes to things that will impact busi-
ness cases, there’s a lack of willingness
to change.

Do you think that’s because of how
volatile our industry is?
There’s a lot of conservatism in our
industry, and there can be very high con-
sequences of something going bad in
terms of well control. But automation and
digital will require significant investment,
and I don’t think any single company can
do it alone. So change is necessary.

If you take Norway as an example, we
will see smaller and smaller pockets of
oil, so we need to do more with what we
already have. That means more exploration
around existing infrastructure. That means
infill drilling. That means more interven-
tion. For that to be economic, you need to
lower your cost or you won’t be competitive.

And I can’t think of any improvement bet-
ter than digital that can actually help us to
transform and lower our costs.

D R I LLI N G CO N T R ACTO R • JAN UARY/FEB RUARY 2023