When a feature published in 2008 speculated that “offshore platforms could soon be run by robots alone, with human beings staying on land,” a commenter in an online discussion group at gCaptain.com dismissed the idea: “I think our ET’s and mechanics will have a job for quite some time.”
That was then; less than six years later, it’s clear that top-to-bottom automation is indispensable to maintaining profitability while maximizing the yield of tired fields and assuring safety in increasingly challenging environments.
From drilling to production, automation is the wave upending everything in its way.
DRILLING
Everyone who has spent time standing next to a drill rig has a story about a surprise, about encountering something that was unexpected and tore-up a bit, causing lengthy delays, or bent a rod and caused the drill path to wander off course, or caused the drill-stem itself to abruptly drop out of sight. Drilling seems, inherently, to be an activity that needs an experienced operator with a deft and learned touch.
But the heuristics that seem almost intuitive to a skilled driller are now finding their way into software, and rapidly driving-up rates of penetration, or ROP. As detailed in a 2012 issue of Oilfield Review,
“Wired drillpipe makes it possible to gather annular pressure and temperature measurements along the drillstring, which allows operators to monitor the entire wellbore. Algorithms quickly condense these data and convert them into flags and control signals for the automation system. Other algorithms sort the data, recognize an event and bypass the driller to initiate proper corrective actions if necessary.”
Further, relying upon the Sandia National Laboratories technology roadmap convention, an industry-wide initiative is now underway to “create a tool to guide the development of this technology through a cross industry collaborative program.”
Sponsored by the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), the International Association of Drilling Contractors (IADC), and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the preparation of the Drilling Systems Automation (DSA) Roadmap comprises 4-steps:
• Planning and preparation, or development of a goals statement for the roadmap process • Visioning, or development of a goals statement for the technology itself
• Roadmap development, or a collaboratively-developed plan for the progress of the technology • Implementation and revision, including monitoring
Now at Step 3, Roadmap participants will meet in Vienna, Austria, in June, and in Galveston, Texas, on 15 September 2014, for a series of workshops that will complement committee and subcommittee meetings.
Daniel Declute-Melancon, Halliburton, and a co- founder of the initiative, said, “The business side of the oil & gas industry is forcing efficient technology change, which requires the shift to automation as other industries have done. The DSA Roadmap efforts are to identify the gaps—hardware, sensors, software, standards, regulations, etc.— so that the industry can work through and create technology solutions that are missing.” He added, “But as a volunteer effort, the timeframe is growing.”
John de Wardt, another co-founder of the initiative, and the founder of the global management firm De Wardt & Company, shared his vision of drilling in the future: “Drilling systems automation is a technology development that will significantly change the drilling business; it is not a question of how but when.
“Many people have spoken eloquently on the need for drilling to adopt automation; however, it remains a struggle through misunderstanding, negative reactions, and inadequate financial rewards. The case for automation in land and platform drilling, especially in the multiple well environments, is huge. The automation of a production platform has been inspired by the owner and end user. The delay in automating land and platform drilling lies in a number of barriers that include return on investment, reliability, ability to maintain higher technology equipment in the drilling environment, and the day rate business model adopted by the drilling industry. One major technical challenge is the fragmented organization of drilling equipment and operations which includes multiple companies providing their own proprietary equipment with their own proprietary measurement and control systems. Another is the inadequacy and lack of sensors in many of the drilling operations; while downhole sensors and controls have advanced, some surface systems remain 1930’s to 1950’s technology.
“The drilling industry will change; drilling rigs will become machines that correctly measure the state of their operations, automatically undertake some operations using algorithms, and provide frequent, timely, accurate, and relevant information to the drillers such that they are able to perform to the highest safety and performance standards possible. The transition has already occurred in industrial automation. Some challenges in the drilling industry are very similar to industrial automation and others require the ability to handle the uncertainty in drilling and, when needed, seamlessly hand back control to the driller. The only question is when and how this transformation to automated drilling will occur.”
There is more to the drive for technological progress, however, than merely cost. As in many other heavy industries, there just doesn’t seem to be so much skilled employment interest in drilling as there once was. According to the Journal of Petroleum Technology, “Adding to the interest [in automated drilling] is the limited supply of skilled drillers. The rapid expansion of drilling in certain U.S. shale plays has resulted in local shortages in directional drillers. And many of the best ones are reaching retirement age. In many other countries with large shale potential, people with directional drilling skills are a rarity.”
For those who do seek offshore work, the safety improvements of automation are well known and readily acknowledged, even if there is a correspond- ing regional economic consequence. From an oral history of the offshore oil and gas industry prepared by Louisiana State University (LSU):
Joe Young, a retired geologist interviewed by Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies in connection with a history of that state’s oil indus- try: “I think the biggest change that took place as far as drilling was concerned was the automation of the things that used to be done by hand. [ ... ] A lot of people would lose fingers. In fact, if you see a guy that worked in oil, it used to be if he worked in the oilfield any time at all, he had a couple of fingers missing where he would get it in the wrong place and have a stand of pipe on his finger, if he did not get it out of the way in time.”
A related LSU study confirms safety improvements – and less interest in the oil and gas industry on the part of younger workers:
“Increased automation and safety programs have mitigated the physical dangers of offshore work, but stress-related health impacts remain high. Satisfaction from offshore work is less evident among younger workers than their predecessors.”
PRODUCTION
Just as automation is taking over drilling work from advancing the drill bit to racking pipe, progress is also occurring in production. According to an inventory of oil and gas wells by the UK’s Dept. of Energy & Climate Change (DECC), there are 140 unmanned and operational wells on the UK continental shelf (UKCS). Almost half of the wells were brought online in just the past 19-years, though development in the North Sea has been active for almost 50-years; the trend is clear and certain to continue.
Just last September, Premier Oil retained Emerson Process Management to automate a new platform in the Solan field, on the UKCS. Production will begin in late 2014.
The platform will be unmanned, and wholly managed from an operations center in Aberdeen Scotland, 100mi. away. According to Emerson:
“Designed for unmanned operations, the platform could serve as a model for future developments in marginal fields, where such operations can help increase profits as well as worker safety. The Solan field is expected to produce approximately 40MMbo, with an estimated initial production rate of 24,000 b/d by the end of 2014.”
The Babbage platform, in the southern North Sea, was designed from the start to be unmanned. Brought online in 2011
it has an expected life of 20 years and exploits gas reserves long ignored because they could not be eco- nomically recovered by conventional means.
BEHIND THE SCENES
The support infrastructure that make drilling and production possible are undergoing change, too, with automation entering every phase of a platform’s life, from construction to decommissioning.
First, the design and construction of platforms them- selves are benefiting from automation. As detailed in a 2012 paper by industrial IT consultant Dr. Oskar Kwok Lum, the use of CAD/CAM drafting, analysis and design tools is automating the preparation of plans.
“Record high oil prices in recent years have contributed much to the investment in oil rigs and production platforms. In line with the number of new oil rigs and platforms being built, production technology in this industry has seen relatively higher levels of invest- ment. Many shipyards new to oil rig building are leveraging on technology to ensure success in the high risk business of oil rig fabrication where penalties are measured in terms of day rates to lease the drilling rig.”
Well construction is benefiting from automation, too. The Edison Welding Institute, for instance, has introduced automated laser inspection of riser pipe welds. According to a technical paper prepared by its engineering staff:
“For riser fabrication, the traditional methods of determining weld quality have been human visual inspection using a borescope-type camera or inspection using a shadow probe. Both methods are subjective and rely on operator decision. Inspection is necessary because a defective weld reduces the pipe’s fatigue life. For offshore J-lay operation, common weld inspection techniques such as UT are currently used for immediate, post-weld inspection on the platform. In an effort to be conserva- tive, traditional inspection techniques can sometimes provide false positives, incorrectly classifying an accept- able weld as one in need of immediate repair.”
The laser inspection technique constructs a 3D image of a weld, analyzes it for conformance with preset tolerance ranges, and forwards the image to the operator when it senses an unacceptable discontinuity.
Similarly, field tests have established that mobile robots may serve reliably on offshore platforms to do routine inspection and testing. According to a 2008 paper prepared by engineers with the Fraunhofer Institute of Manufacturing Engineering and Automation, “The evaluation of the first autonomous service robot that has ever been operated in offshore environments has proven the applicability of mobile robots to offshore platforms. Different types of inspection tasks (visual and acoustic inspection, gas measuring) have been programmed and executed by the robot successfully without ever jeopardizing the safety of the platform or the platform personnel.”
Simultaneously, a team led by Akbar Moghaddam, formerly at the University of Oslo and now with ABB, has developed a climbing robot for use on offshore platforms:
“Walloid is a promising prototype for oil and gas offshore environments. Although it’s still an ongo- ing project and is being perfected through tests and academic reviews, but the development process of the project has made it a promising piece of work for further development and investment by the industry. Current design satisfies several critical requirements of a climbing robot such as stability, flexibility, homog- enous force distribution, minimum power consump- tion that prevents motors overheating.”
At the end of a platform’s life, another robot may help to dismantle it. According to a 2013 report of a prototype’s performance in the laboratory, in the International Journal of Control and Automation, “The 13 3/8in. casing was severed easily by the cut- ting robot in a short time. The cutting process was completed perfectly under the precision control and monitoring system.”
BRAVE NEW WORLD
As the reliance of offshore work on automation steadily increases, the report of the Deepwater Horizon Study Group sounds a sobering note:
“Emergency situations caused by control system failures or design weaknesses are often trusted to be handled and mitigated by human intervention. However, this requires both fast and accurate alarms and warnings, as well as detailed operator knowledge of the system. This may in practice be unrealistic, especially considering that the control system behavior and alarms after a control system failure may be undocumented and inadequate for making the correct decisions. All human behavior is influenced by the context in which it occurs, and operators in high-tech systems are often at the mercy of the design of the automation system software. Many recent accidents blamed on operator error could more accurately be labeled as resulting from flawed system and interface design. Inadequacies in communication between humans and machines are becoming an increasingly important factor in accidents.”
Almost certainly, then, given the stakes, the last step of the Sandia technology roadmap will have to be embedded industry-wide into the offshore culture: Constant systems evaluation and revision.
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