Drilling Automation: A Catalyst for Change

Abstract

Seabed Rig is a small company named after its audacious vision: creating a device able to drill a well on the bottom of the ocean. The company, 20% owned by Statoil, is using what it learned from a prototype to build a rig capable of drilling on land, or an offshore platform, with no workers on site. “You command it, you don’t control it,” said Kenneth Søndervik, vice president of sales and marketing at Seabed. Rather than a person controlling machines putting together pipes, an automated system will respond to a command, such as “pick up 3,000 meters of pipe,” from the computer program controlling drilling. The ability of these machines to work together on their own is essential for Seabed because Statoil needs a rig capable of drilling in the Arctic, and other environments that would put workers in harm’s way. This semantic distinction points to a fundamental change in the drilling business, and the people who work on the rigs. Seabed is building a rig like no other, using components supplied by oil and automation companies. “The big thing is we are not an inventing company. We are an engineering company taking all that’s out there,” said Søndervik. Seabed is working on creating a confined rig floor—the footprint is 9 m by 9 m—with robots programmed using software developed for NASA by Energid Technologies. The US company’s software is also being used to control the next generation of lunar rovers. For the drilling, Seabed will be choosing from a growing number of major oil and service companies developing software that does the job. Statoil, ExxonMobil, Petrobras, Schlumberger, National Oilwell Varco (NOV), and Baker Hughes, represent a sample of the technology leaders seeking ways to program all or parts of the drilling process. Shell appears to have taken it the furthest, with an automated program that has drilled multilateral wells. “It is not science fiction, it is what we have done,” said Peter Sharpe, executive vice president of wells at Shell. Its SCADAdrill System has been demonstrated in Canada and the Netherlands, with testing in progress in two US shale plays, the Marcellus and Haynesville.