A Novel Approach to Drilling Engineering Sensitivity Analysis and Visualization

Abstract Well design is a process to integrate multiple designs objects, such as trajectory, wellbore geometry, BHA and drillstring, fluid, and rig specification to work synergically to deliver a successful drilling execution. The method to validate coherency of those various design objects is by performing engineering analysis through modeling, such as torque and drag, hydraulic, vibration, and casing load analysis. Every time any design objects are changed, the engineer needs to rerun engineering analysis calculations to ensure the proposed changes are still acceptable or within equipment specification and design standards. Engineers also need to define the most optimal parameters and designs in order to get the best performance in execution. For this purpose, the engineer spends time performing engineering sensitivity analysis to understand the effect of various parameters on the design KPIs. The challenge with the current drilling engineering application is that engineers need to perform multiple scenarios manually, which is very cumbersome and time-consuming. Time requirements will limit the engineer to perform different kinds of scenarios. Comparing and visualizing the analysis results of multiple scenarios also can be difficult, especially where they involve multiple dimensions. Novel ideas or solutions were introduced in the cloud-based new digital well construction planning applications. The system will automatically create multiple scenarios based on the number of sensitivity parameters. For example, calculating the sensitivity of hydraulic calculation for 5 different flowrates, 5 RPMs, 5 fluid densities, and 5 ROPs will produce 625 scenarios. And each scenario will be calculated for every 100 ft from run start depth to run end depth. All those will be calculated with the power of cloud computation to speed up simulation time and the results stored in the data cube, which is available for business intelligence tools to visualize it. Leveraging the latest development of data visualization technology also brings a new way for an engineer to view multidimensions of plots to quickly get the insight for decisions. This new method of sensitivity analysis and visualization will improve drilling engineer working efficiency to identify potential risks and formulate the optimal parameters for the drilling program. The engineer can easily interact with the plots and understand the effect of multiple parameters on the engineering simulation results. This will give a new user experience for drilling engineers on evaluating drilling engineering sensitivity analysis results and plots in the new digital way of working.