The Issue

The development and updating of drilling schedules is often a painful and unintegrated process, with a large number of interfaces and much manual effort and re-work. The drilling schedule is often seen as an individualistic “input” to the process of developing production forecasts and associated resource requirements,
rather than an integrated “output.”

This makes for a difficult, error-prone process that can be challenging to keep up to date with ever-changing data from a variety of sources.

The PetroVR Solution

Rather than separating the drilling schedule activity and creating many interfaces that must be managed separately, PetroVR integrates drilling scheduling, right into the workflow itself. The drilling schedule in PetroVR then becomes an “output” of the integrated development plan rather than the traditional “input.”

How It Works

1.Choose user-defined or auto-develop well count
Either specify the number of wells, or let PetroVR automatically develop all of the reserves in the reservoir and calculate the number of wells required to do that (taking account of all uncertainties).

Figure 1: Auto-development speeds this, enabling that. You can return later to verify

2.Specify drilling duration
Drilling duration (with uncertainty) is specified for each well or completion.

Figure 2: Enter Drilling Duration, with consideration for uncertainty

3.Specify real life constraints and policies
Real life constraints and policies are specified, such as number of rigs, rig types for certain of wells and completions, number of rigs allowed per drilling location, prioritization of wells, drilling deferment policies (if facilities are at capacity, for example).

4.Now, fully integrate your dynamic drilling scheduling
PetroVR is a time step simulator – it simulates every day what is going on in the project, taking into account all of the rules and constraints that have been set.

So when it comes to drilling wells, PetroVR knows what wells are supposed to be drilled, it checks if a rigis available, it checks if there is space at the drilling site, it checks if that well is actually needed (perhaps because of a production constraint) and then goes ahead and drills the well with a drilling duration and uncertainty as specified.

By knowing all of this information, PetroVR is capable of producing a dynamic drilling schedule on the fly, taking into account all specified constraints and uncertainties. It is fully integrated into the whole development process, so if something changes (the reserves, the expected well performance, a production constraint or rig availability), then the drilling schedule is automatically recalculated along with the production forecast and all other outputs.

Figure 3: Fully integrated Dynamic Drilling Schedule

The Results

PetroVR integrates all the inputs into our drilling schedule and produces an instantly updated, dynamic drilling schedule as an output.