Improving Drilling Performance Using Drilling Efficiency Optimization (DEO)

Abstract Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) is the leading Exploration and Production company in The Sultanate of Oman, and it delivers the majority of the country's crude oil and natural gas supply. It also has a great focus on delivering excellence, growth, and sustainable value creation within and beyond the Oil and Gas Industry. It is a pioneer in adopting state of the art technologies to run its business and to even goes beyond the Oil and Gas industry by supporting the nation in capability building and sustainable development. This is but an implementation of Petroleum Development Oman's Vision which is to be renowned and respected for the excellence of our people and the value created for the Sultanate of Oman and all the stake holders. With the heavy focus from the world in the recent years on Digitalization and Transformation, Petroleum Development Oman has set its sails in the Digitalization journey by creating a dedicated team that supports the company's business through digitalization. With the focus on Digitalization comes the utilization of Artificial Intelligence. The driver behind this focus is to have an increased efficiency, achieve greater business agility and creating value for the business in an environment where the oil price is highly volatile. In the Oil and Gas industry, drilling performance is key to reduce the overall cost of the well construction. Different companies strive for performance improvements through many ways that include technology, optimization and recently, digitalization. Automating the Drilling Efficiency Optimization (DEO) is one example of applying digitalization in the Oil and Gas Industry. DEO is a tool that was developed over the years to suggest the optimum parameters that lead to optimum performance based on historical data. In the past, the DEO Roadmap construction was done manually. It was time consuming and had limits when it comes to amendments as the data can be updated only after drilling a well. Nowadays, Petroleum Development Oman has managed to automate the construction of the DEO Roadmap and allow it to be updated continuously in a feedback loop using data mining and Artificial Intelligence.DEO is now set to process over 500 wells every year with a target to improve and optimize drilling efficiency.This has led to improvements in people's efficiency as it takes less time to view the roadmap. DEO was piloted in of the deep wells where hard rock is drilled and It led to improvements in the drilling performance where savings as high as $430,000 per well were achieved.