DECARBONIZING DRILLING
greenhouse gas emissions and efficiency.’
And there’s various ways you can get that,”
Mr Ferguson said. “You get it by drilling a
quicker well, by managing energy use, by
choosing the fuel supply.”
Because the bulk of emissions from
drilling operations comes from the burn-
ing of diesel fuel, decarbonization efforts
have focused on initiatives such as rig
electrification, alternative fuels, or fuel and
energy efficiency approaches. Some opera-
tors are looking at incentive arrangements
to share the benefits of fuel savings with
contractors. Equinor, for one, has included
fuel incentives in its rig contracts.

“It’s vital that drilling rigs perform effi-
ciently and have as low a fuel consump-
tion as possible,” said Ellen Hald, Manager,
Lower Carbon Solutions in Drilling and
Wells at Equinor. Existing solutions like
engine management systems, exhaust
heat recovery and hybrid solutions will not
be sufficient to close the gap toward emis-
sions goals, she said. “This emphasizes
the need for both smart energy usage on
our rigs and that we need new solutions
in our toolbox,” she said. “Strong collabo-
ration between operators and suppliers
have been essential for development of our
industry in the past and will be important
for safe and sustainable energy transition
going forward.”
Shell, too, has begun bolting incentiviza-
tion for decarbonization performance onto
its contracts while incorporating language
around aligned values, including decar-
bonization, into its sustainability clauses,
Mr Ferguson said. “We have made cleaner
well operations one of our five key pil-
lars for how we want to improve how we
deliver our wells activities between 2020
and 2050.”
He pointed to Shell’s partnership with
Diamond Offshore on an engine manage-
ment system on the Ocean Endeavor semi-
submersible as a “role model” for this sort
of approach.

“What we’ve done is said, ‘Where we
save diesel, we will pass that benefit on
to you in the form of an incentive,’” Mr
Ferguson said, describing this decision
as “a natural thing to walk into once we
understood it… Why not just make that the
norm?” For contractors, they see earlier involve-
ment with their customers’ drilling pro-
grams as a cost-effective way to increase
collaboration and, therefore, efficiency. For
example, at what Mr Pelley called the
tactical level, he noted that contractors
can reduce fuel consumption during rig
moves simply by adjusting the transit
speed. “There’s a diminishing value once
your engine load is getting up to 70-80%.”
At a more strategic level, the operator
and contractor can also better collaborate
to identify decarbonization technologies
that give maximize value, with an under-
standing of the time and costs associ-
ated with first piloting and then deploying
those technologies at scale, Mr Pelley said.

For some larger decarbonization proj-
ects where upgrade costs can run into
the millions, contractors need significant
terms on their contracts to pay that back.

“We cannot invest unilaterally,” Mr Pelley
said. “Commercially, operator participation
is absolutely critical right now.” DC