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Abstract The vision of the oil and gas industry is to be fully automated. However, directional drilling is still using conventional methods that mainly depend on the directional drillers with their experience, decisions, competencies, skills, and motivations. Moreover, measuring-while-drilling (MWD) has also seen minimal automation, as directional surveys are still taken conventionally, which requires the involvement of MWD engineers. Such operations are dependent on the personnel therefore exposed to human error and inefficiency. The automated directional drilling and surveying system is a solution designed to automatically drill directional wells with rotary steerable systems (RSS). The system is pre-fed the planned well trajectory, and once engaged while drilling, uses its control algorithms and directional surveys to control the RSS tool, while correcting the trajectory as drilling progressed by constantly updating the target inclinations and azimuths in a closed loop system. Meanwhile, the automated surveying system takes directional surveys "on-the-fly" and without the MWD engineer’s intervention, automatically feeding the surveys to the directional drilling system in real time, resulting in full directional drilling automation. The system was first deployed worldwide in the Middle East, and it improved the directional drilling performance in directional drilling operations, especially drilling with complex directional well profiles. Furthermore, the system reduced the downlink frequency by 63% in each hole section and reduced wellbore tortuosity by 10%, while improving rate of penetration (ROP) by 35% when compared to the field average ROP. In addition, the automated directional surveying reduced drill-string stationary time, ultimately reducing rig flat time and differential sticking risks, while providing a higher survey frequency and density when compared to conventional surveying systems. The high survey data frequency and density feature also reduced well position uncertainty, thereby improving well placement within target reservoirs while reducing wellbore tortuosity and improving anti-collision management. On the environmental aspect, the automated system improved drilling performance and ROP in the directional sections and, overall, reduced the drilling rig operating time, thereby reducing the associated average rig CO2 emission. The automated directional drilling and directional survey systems can be integrated with both new and existing drilling technologies. This will achieve full automation with the ability of supervision in directional drilling for optimizing oil and gas well delivery operation.
Nesaif et al. (Tue,) studied this question.