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Automated drilling
Computer-controlled drilling is slowly changing how the oil and gas industry discovers natural resources. Automated drilling can reduce the number of injuries to zero and increase productivity and accuracy.
History
Comparison to human drilling
Disadvantages
Global oil prices and a surplus of gas have caused an improvement in the economics of automated projects. Meanwhile, in North America, human-operated drilling has greatly improved.
Companies like Shell have chosen to scale back and even cancel many projects in which automated drilling would play a crucial role in developing thousands of wells. This is after the company made years of headway in automated technology. According to a 2011 issue of Drilling Contractor, the first generation of Shell's automated control system already showed a 70% improvement in rate of penetration (ROP) in test areas. But human drillers have recently narrowed the gap, leaving that number irrelevant.
Advantages
Great flaws remain in the capabilities and availability of rig crews on a global scale, keeping automated drilling a necessity for the near future. A small group of early adopters and innovators are responsible for determining the success of automated drilling. Their success could affect major changes in how drilling systems are designed and operated by probing that data and algorithms can make drilling safer, more consistent and more economical by reducing nonproductive time (NPT).
Future
Experts are divided on their view of the future for automated systems: Some see a generation of mostly autonomous rigs while others say that, in the near future, rigs will most likely be controlled remotely by drillers, geologists, and engineers working in office buildings ome experts foresee a gene rather than in the field, and on several wells at once. Systems are currently evolving to turn drillers and rigs into something akin to commercial airliners, whereby many functions of the airplane are automated, giving pilots the ability to take control if they need to.
In the latter scenario, new fleets of rigs do not need to be created, but existing fleets will be retrofitted with highly advanced computer programs that use real-time data combined with mechanized equipment to increase the ROP and maintain wellbore stability. Two of the most recent examples of commercial technologies were developed by members of SPE’s Drilling Systems Automation Technical Section (DSATS).