Petrobras Trims Drilling by Months With Software That Will One Day Automate Its Offshore Rigs

Abstract

After 6 years of using its custom-built drilling advisory system, Brazilian oil and gas company Petrobras has become increasingly confident in the technology’s abilities to help prevent many of the complex problems that challenge pre-salt drilling operations. Between the summer of 2014 and the end of 2019, the company credits the software innovation with the prediction of more than 100 drilling issues ranging from stuckpipe events to drillpipe leaks. Petrobras said the early warnings prevented an additional 150 days of deepwater drilling which amounts to $130 million in savings, in a new paper (SPE 199077) published in July during the SPE Virtual Latin American and Caribbean Petroleum Engineering Conference. André Leibsohn Martins, a senior consultant with Petrobras, emphasized that the headline figure is “only from diagnosis” of drilling problems and does not include gains Petrobras has made in terms of optimizing the drilling process. More details on that front may be forthcoming since he said the operator is expanding the capabilities of the software to launch a full-fledged drilling optimization campaign next year. The next stop on the roadmap will be a fully automated system that will control the company’s drilling operations. Martin said the current monitoring-and-advisory system outlined in the paper he coauthored with several colleagues represents “the brain” of that system. “We have all the tools and the methods to create the logics for automated drilling, which will come in the very near future,” he said. A Long Time Coming As much as it portends what is to come, the paper also serves as a reminder that the digital transformation of the oil and gas industry is not so new. The groundwork to create the current advisory system was laid in 2004, 2 years before Petrobras’ first pre-salt discovery was made in the Lula Field of the Santos Basin which produced over 1 million B/D in 2019. Today, virtually all the company’s wells are drilled in the challenging pre-salt reservoirs with the assistance of the software. Speaking to the past, Martin reflected on the drivers that led to the current iteration. Chief among them was the need to address the misuse of real-time drilling data. “We had a lot of sensors, and we are paying for the sensors, and we had to rely on subjective decisions based on personal experience,” he explained. After acknowledging this as a performance limiter, “we started to think about the digital twin and how we would implement that.” Other problems Petrobras faced when the project kicked off last decade included the fact that the rank and file on its deepwater rigs were young and therefore lacked the experience to catch drilling issues early on. These factors, on top of the high cost and risks of deepwater exploration, committed Petrobras to what is now a 16-year journey to realize the benefits of digitization.