Remote Operations for Drilling Services in Deepwater Environments: An Industry Breakthrough

Abstract

Abstract The remote drilling operations concept has been widely utilized and executed around the world on high volume, land-based jobs. Applying the same concept in the offshore environment has largely been avoided because of job complexity and high operational cost; in this environment, even a small failure could lead to substantial consequences. Ironically, however, offshore environments have bigger issues than are encountered in land-based operations with regard to personnel availability, significant logistical challenges and related risks, the burden of rig space to accommodate workers, and many other constraints and challenges and which could be alleviated by implementing remote operations concepts. Brazil is at the forefront of deepwater oil exploration and has been facing new challenges in developing discoveries much farther from traditional offshore areas, providing many opportunities for streamlining operations through innovation. After achieving a sustainable stage in real-time drilling projects through remote monitoring, modeling, and optimizing processes on deepwater operations, it was decided to take a further step and conduct a feasibility review for advancing efforts in remote drilling operations in these deepwater environments. The project was approved by the operator to be executed on specific development wells for activities such as measurement-while-drilling (MWD) tool programming, acquisition system configuration, prejob quality checks, recorded mode data processing, and daily reporting. The remote operations project began with a "shadow job" to test the process of combining and aligning the resources in terms of people, processes, reliable communications infrastructure, and remote control technologies. Following the success of the shadow job, the remote operations center performed 12 bit runs with different services provided on 6 different platforms. Importantly, there was not a single hour of NPT caused by remote operations during entire project.