This year’s severe winter may have pushed Spring Break-up a little later, but for those who manage drilling programs one thing that can’t be pushed is drilling lookbacks.
This week, we’re looking at the three most common barriers to effective drill program evaluation. Each week, XI Technologies scans their unique combination of enhanced industry data to provide trends and insights that have value for professionals doing business in the WCSB. If you’d like to receive our Wednesday Word to the Wise in your inbox, subscribe here.
Drilling programs, regardless of size, are a big investment in your company’s future. But evaluating drilling programs have perennially suffered from three issues:
- Varied and changing expectations – knowing what metrics are required by different stakeholder groups and being able to provide meaningful analysis that delivers those metrics.
- Data limitations & inconsistencies – over the past decade there has been an explosion of data being collected, but it hasn’t been reliably collected in a single, accessible, and quality-checked repository. The key unleashing the power of big data is to get it all in one place, make it reliable, and make it accessible.
- Fewer people, less time, but the same amount of work – Drilling is down. That means drilling departments and drilling engineering firms are working with smaller teams, making do with less. But regardless of drilling activity, it is vital to do lookbacks to ensure optimum efficiency in planning and future drills.
Extensive digital drilling data and analysis tools in OffsetAnalyst software are helping to address all these issues and XI Technologies has been a leader in this arena. Based on the real-world results we’ve seen from our many clients, we believe you owe it to yourself, your executive, and your company’s shareholders to take a closer look at your lookback process. What are you measuring? Are you only measuring against your own past performance or that of others? How do your wells compare to those nearby in terms of drill time, drill problems, and non-productive time? Are your wells pacesetters in your area and, if not, what could you have done to make them so? How do your go-to drilling contractors compare to those working nearby? Are you comparing truly analogous wells?
XI Technologies’ VP of Drilling Services Andy Newsome answers many of these questions in a brief paper co-authored with Andrew Nurek, a Drilling Team Lead of a major Canadian E&P. The paper, entitled Drilling Lookbacks: Drill program evaluation made simple and effective, is available as a free download here.
To see how easy a drill program evaluation workflow can be performed in OffsetAnalyst software. Contact XI for a personalized demo or call 403-296-0964.