SPE-172057-MS

Automation of ADCO Well Delivery Process - A Dream that has Become a

Reality
Hussein F Zahran and Firas I Al-Fardan, ADCO

Copyright 2014, Society of Petroleum Engineers

This paper was prepared for presentation at the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, 10 –13 November 2014.

This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE program committee following review of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s). Contents
of the paper have not been reviewed by the Society of Petroleum Engineers and are subject to correction by the author(s). The material does not necessarily reflect
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consent of the Society of Petroleum Engineers is prohibited. Permission to reproduce in print is restricted to an abstract of not more than 300 words; illustrations may
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Abstract
The process of well planning & well delivery consists of several connected sub-processes and major
activities that are carried out across different organizational functions and disciplines; on the other hand
demand for energy increases, and ADCO as an organization is seeking new ways to optimize and improve
operations – shortening timeframes to production and optimizing cash flow; taking those facts into
consideration ADCO decided to take a lead in building an innovative solution entirely in-house gaining
from the technical expertise of the different business units within the organization and its CIT division to
provide a cutting-edge solution.
Electronic Well Delivery Process (eWDP) provides a standardized method to easily manage and track
all pre-drilling/post-drilling activities including tasks, documents, people & rigs.
With the eWDP release, a measurable positive impact has been observed and the mentioned below is
a set of day to day savings eWDP is contributing for the overall corporate objectives
1. Different asset teams were able to smoothly communicate the drilling requirements in a productive
manner allowing obtaining the right approvals on time, giving an edge for management to forecast
the set strategic objectives and enabling the right decisions to be taken.
2. Planning teams are able to forecast the drilling materials requirements at an early stage through
navigating automatically the store inventory and identifying the availability of drilling materials.
3. eWDP provides drilling operation teams with tools to forecast the best rig move route for the
allocated rigs “Rig Move Optimization”, allowing optimization in terms of both cost and duration
optimization.
4. Planners are able to optimize drilling plans according to the performance of the execution of the
strategic objectives, which allows for taking the corrective actions on time and avoiding potential
planning risks.
As a conclusion the eWDP provides a local knowledgebase for the practices ADCO follows in the well
delivery process, setting the basis for optimizing the overall business performance in alignment with set
goals.
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Introduction
ADCO delivers different types of production and exploration wells in addition to executing major drilling
and engineering projects, and the process of well planning & well delivery consists of several connected
sub-processes and major tasks that are carried out across different organizational functions and disciplines.
This involves a great deal of communication among different business units and between project team
members, in addition to a lot of data being transferred and/or shared throughout manual and electronic
information systems.
Most of the teams’ day to day work consists of preparing spreadsheets and regular documents, along
with dealing with electronic systems that are not integrated together properly. These factors have always
created a lot of data, communication, and time utilization problems, since a lot of the information workers’
time is usually spent on searching for the required information, which is usually scattered and dispersed
in many locations.
The well delivery process consists of different major phases just like any major project. It is all driven
by the organization’s strategic and long-term development plans, which are broken down into short-term
business plans (usually five-year plans) and undergo a series of review and approval cycles by share-
holders.
The short-term or five-year business plans consist of a set of asset requirements (drilling, workover, and
logging) and those requirements get consolidated into one master plan within the corporate Drilling and
Workover Schedule (DWS).
The project team evaluated the available packages within the market through an extensive market
research and a decision was taken to implement an in-house platform that fits the dynamic nature of the
organization and to build a platform based on ADCO’s business expertise.
Those above mentioned problems created the business need to provide an IT solution that addresses the
issues and enhances the various well delivery processes by providing a set of systems and applications that
are seamlessly integrated together using one infrastructure; this solution is called the Electronic Well
Delivery Process (eWDP).
eWDP provides a base infrastructure to automate the defined well delivery processes and activities,
with the support of built-in engines and tools to maximize the different organization units’ productivity.
The following are an example of the different processes being automated within ADCO:-
– Asset Team’s Requirements
– Business planning preparation & approval
– Drilling & Workover Scheduling
– Well Budgeting
– Well planning & Design
– Material Forecasting
– Tie-In planning and Scheduling
– Production Rate Forecast

Contribution to Oil & Gas Business

eWDP is an innovative contribution towards standardizing the well delivery processes and major phases
locally and increasing the efficiency of meeting the strategic goals related to increasing oil production,
reducing rig move cost, and enhancing overall planning performance.
Looking into the different aspects of the well delivery process, a set of planning activities is conducted
in order to issue and track the annual drilling & workover business plan, the process starts by submitting
the different asset team’s requirements through an approval workflow to evaluate the requirements
priorities and to avoid any planning risks that would appear in the future, within the approval of the set
of requirements being submitted the drilling planning team starts the scheduling activity and to forecast
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the availability of the rig fleet within the organization to assure a maximum utilization of the organization
resources along with minimizing the operating cost, in this process drilling planning team is supported by
a set of systems and applications to be able to get a clear picture of the overall exact situation in regard
to the different scheduling factors (resources, cost, and time).
The following is a set of tools that supports the planning team during the scheduling stage:-
1. Rig move optimization:- This application utilizes an optimization engine built over the corporate
GIS within ADCO that receives a set of scheduled activities and based on the available data the
engine suggest the best rig route from the processed GIS data as to minimize the efforts and cost
during the rig move activity.
2. Materials Availability Forecast During the scheduling of activities, drilling planning team is
required to validate the availability of the drilling materials prior to issuing the scenario to assure
no delays during the execution and to prepare or purchase required materials ahead of time, the
materials availability check engine process well by well within a specific scenario against ADCO’s
inventory management system to check and validate required materials and to highlight to the
drilling planning representative any shortage of materials as to take a proactive action.
3. Rig Simulation As to maximize the rig fleet within the organization the system is supported by
an intelligent system that gives the planning representative a facility to conduct multiple scenarios
with different assignments and allocation of activities to available rigs which will allow the
planner to decide and take the proper action whenever he is confident of the schedule results and
the assurance of utilizing the available rig fleet.
Upon issuing a new scenario all stakeholders of the drilling requirements are able to verify, operate and
update any of the well information as a planned activity. The whole scheduling process - after this stage
and acquiring the top management approvals - is governed by a change management process that assures
collecting automatically the required approvals and highlighting any cost, production or duration impact
prior to applying any changes to the schedule as to avoid any impact on the agreed strategic plan, upon
obtaining the final approval the drilling planning representative is notified to take the necessary updates
to issue a new schedule.
The eWDP system is built to provide all automatic notifications, approval requests and reporting tools
as to make sure of having all the different teams being aligned and updated at the right time as to take the
necessary actions. For this a KPI system is built to measure the different planning stages and to highlight
the performance of the well preparation activities and at the point whenever a delay is occurred the system
highlights the problems as to allow for taking any necessary corrective actions on the schedule.
Before executing the actual drilling activities a set of design activities are to be completed, this process
ensures preparing and issuing the well program (e-Prognosis & Drilling Program), this process is built
over a dynamic workflow to ensure collecting all required data from the different available data sources
and allowing the different engineering disciplines to submit the information and data required in an
integral format allowing all different units to review and submit any feedback and to be archived upon
approval in ADCO’s document management repository for future reference.
The above shows a major contribution towards the Oil & Gas business, with this fact the team was able
to build the eWDP as a an extendable platform that accommodates both onshore and offshore well
delivery process workflows and data capturing, the possibilities are limitless as the framework was built
with an understanding of the different challenges that face the oil and gas industry.
Original concept vs eWDP application
In the beginning, the well delivery process in ADCO was based on a mixture of manual set of workflow
approvals that are not connected together and a set of stand-alone based applications to process the well
delivery information. This mixture was not interfacing with the existing ADCO systems and there were
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no proper data validation rules available to govern the data entry process which introduced integrity data
issues along with extra efforts to fix the resulted data problems.
As well, there was enormous amount of time consumed by other business units when the need came
for communication, approvals, data gathering and data editing and updating through a formalized
workflow. In addition, data was gathered poorly from a single source, which served as an inefficient way
of storing such important data for the business.
All the previous factors contributed in having a slow actions, data quality problems, well delivery
process overheads and communication delays which resulted in impacting the overall strategic drilling
business plan and in the end resulted in the firm losing its standards of time efficiency and ease of access
to information related to the business plan delivery as a direct result of having the data exponentially
increasing and the well delivery process was open ended.
With analyzing the situation a demand raised to document, define, and automate ADCO’s well delivery
processes to ensure building a unique framework that streamline the different ADCO well delivery
processes within a unified repository with an extendable interface with the existing ADCO core E&P
systems ensuring fast delivery of information to end users and unifying a single access point for well
information.
A tremendous effort was spent in researching the global standards and identifying what fits ADCO as
a prime Oil & Gas organization in the UAE, the practice involved looking into adopting or purchasing a
system that would provide the required needs but no system was found suitable and at that stage ADCO
assigned its IT resources and focal points from the different business units to build the required platform
that accommodates the dynamic nature of ADCO business.
On so many levels, the platform of eWDP built from scratch within ADCO is not only solving the
issues faced during the previous conventional business planning perspectives, it surpasses the issues and
also contributed to major advantages in business plan delivery forecasting and data delivery.
From a data delivery perspective, the system has the ability to report specific well details measures for
a desired business plan, it also performs comparisons of different reports and well details for a specific
type of wells and/or business plan preparation cycles against each other. This gives the privilege of
decision making in terms of duration, cost and performance of different business plan configurations with
budget and resources consideration.
Taking a step back, this powerful electronic well delivery process allows the different teams to compare
and forecast drilling activities for specific fields or projects, which could also be extended to comparing
the data with different business plan scenarios that allows for selecting an optimized schedule. This
benefits the management and corporate planning to review the data and compare asset versus asset
requirement against drilling activities to distribute and cover the drilling activities accordingly for an
efficient business plan delivery with the available resources in a timely manner with establishing different
level of priorities, from small scales in terms of wells and on a larger scale in terms of projects and
commercial value.
In a recent addition, the platform added new capabilities in terms of tracking the wells essential
execution documents before spud and after completion. This system is called the Green Well, which
serves in tracking the workflow approval process and systematically monitors & update well readiness
against a specific time frame. In such, the generation of well prognosis to be completed before the well
spud duration of 90 days and the drilling program to be written up and approved before 30 days from spud
etc. using a color legend that describes where each well is standing up-to-date. This also includes details
of subsurface tubing and completions in the well to be used for material forecasting purposes. This
benefits the planning engineers to either delay or bring forward wells depending on material availability
for a specific type of well. On the other hand, this tracks the process and progress of the workflow of
getting all the documentations approved and completed for quality check, and is all electronically gathered
and viewed before the job is executed.
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IT provided the system architecture that accommodates the required needs and ensures the system
extendibility and ability to accommodate future needs with the verification of the assigned business units.
Benefiting and leveraging over the service oriented architecture concepts allowed the eWDP to benefit
of introducing a flexible system in terms of providing well planning information from a single point of
concern and integrating with the different backend systems of ADCO through a controlled integration tier
ensuring a separation of concern pattern that allows for minimal efforts to be introduced whenever a
strategic decision would be undertaken in regard to replacing or changing the backend systems and as well
to promote the reuse of the different system components whenever required. With the application of this
concept the information and data within the system is governed by a secure communication tier that
defines the security levels of the different modules and systems and according to the set privileges
information is shared and communicated to the appropriate users/systems.
It is believed that the adoption of the latest IT platforms, tools and services supported ADCO as an oil
& gas organization to deliver an extendable platform that streamlines the different well delivery
workflows and processes under one system with a clear vision of having this through a single access point.

Achieved Results
The collaboration of the different teams and the open channels in transferring the business knowledge,
allowed ADCO to establish and build a reliable platform that supports in achieving the set objectives
through utilizing the internal business and technical expertise.
With the introduction of the eWDP framework an opportunity was introduced within ADCO to build
a local knowledgebase for the practices ADCO follows for the well delivery process that sets the basis for
optimizing the different well planning constrains (production, time, cost, rig move and materials)
Based on the above a measurable impact has been observed in regard to the business process overall
performance, as well as areas that require additional focus are highlighted towards process re-engineering
and accommodating the organization strategic objectives.
The mentioned below are a set of day to day savings eWDP is contributing towards the overall
corporate objectives.
1. Different asset teams are able to smoothly communicate drilling & workover requirements in a
productive manner allowing for obtaining the right approvals on time with no delays, giving an
edge for management to forecast the agreed strategic objectives and be able of taking the right
corrective decisions whenever required.
2. Planning teams are able to forecast the drilling materials requirements in an early stage through
navigating automatically the store inventory and identifying the availability of the drilling &
Tie-In materials, which allow the different planning representatives to issue a tactical schedule
according to any changes that would impact the base and agreed strategic plan.
3. On another direction eWDP provided drilling operation teams tools to identify the best rig move
route for the allocated rigs, the GIS engine process different scenarios and suggests the optimum
rig route accordingly allowing for cost and duration optimization.
4. Drilling Planning team is able to optimize the issued drilling & workover schedules according to
the performance of the actual execution of the planned strategic objectives using the system
reporting capabilities, this result in taking the corrective actions on time and avoiding potential
planning risks.

Conclusion
During the initial project planning phase, team members took a 15-week market research exercise to find
a similar solutions in the region and the world, but team only found a sub set of tools that covers 40% of
the total well delivery practices and standards. The project team came to a conclusion that the cost of
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implementing a hybrid solution or customizing a software that suits the business needs of ADCO is very
high in terms of implementation, future expansion, maintenance and support So, the decision was taken
to build the entire solution in-house throughout a joint effort between all contributing business units and
the information technology division as to allow for maximum utilization of ADCO’s own business and
technical expertise.