What happens when drilling engineers put established assumptions to the test? In this interview, we speak with Jim Jacobsen, drilling manager at IPT Well Solutions, about combining engineering experience with data-driven planning to find more efficient and cost-effective ways to deliver wells.

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Living Digital podcast. Today we're going to be speaking with Jim Jacobsen, drilling manager at IPT Well Solutions, about why traditional well planning assumptions are being challenged in the modern day and what happens when teams start to take a more data-driven approach to the projects at hand.

We're going to be talking about a recent onshore project in Wyoming as an example, and about how questioning conservative design norms, rethinking rig selection, and leveraging modern digital planning tools helps IPT to cut risks, reduce costs, and unlock significant savings per well for their clients. It's a practical case study in smarter, more disciplined drilling and planning.

Jim, thanks a lot for joining us today. And could you give us a little snapshot into what IPT does and what you do at the company?

Jim Jacobsen: Sure. We are a consulting engineering firm that specializes in downhole project engineering and project execution. My day-to-day deals with drilling operations, designing and executing well plans for various clients, whether they're vertical, conventional, horizontal, unconventional. gas disposal, acid gas injectors, saltwater disposal wells, geothermal wells, pretty much anything that requires a drilling rig, we are involved with.

Okay, so, you gave us a little snapshot of the kind of things that you deal with, like you said, anything that necessitates a well. So, when you look at onshore developments in the US today, what are the main pressures around well planning, rig selection, cost control, that kind of thing? And why are things coming to a head now?

Jim Jacobsen: I think they've always been important. The cost control is the primary driver. I mean, you're looking at how much reservoir can I interact with for the given amount of drilling budget that any company is willing to spend. And having a system in place to manage your engineering and manage your creep, as it were, as you get into development, you have a lot of different people working on different projects that are part of the same project. And you can find that even though two people are doing the same job, they're doing that same job differently. And you get project creep and you get program creep and you get program separation and you find yourself with incidents that you didn't have before. And that was because in some cases, your people are doing things that are not necessarily aligned with a company's policies. along well planning, that's equally important.

You have to drill the well to plan. You have to make sure you're doing the right things. And rig selection is kind of a lost art because most everybody just takes what rig is available without really looking at what you have to do or what you need. And most shale plays, for example, that's fine because you can look at what your neighbor's doing and say, well, I want to do what he's doing. But if you have a project that is a little bit out of the normal and you need to think about what you're going to purchase or rent as rig equipment goes, with the wrong rig, it can cause the project to be massively overspent because you've got an underpowered rig or you are overspending on rig because you've got a way over spec rig more than you need.

So, it's kind of a fine line that you have to follow. And fortunately, most rig contractors have rigs that fit the standard deviation of what you're looking for. But there are occasions where you have to step outside that and look at exactly what you need for the project at hand.

So, let's use the recent Wyoming project that you worked on as an example. What were your planning and engineering goals there?

Jim Jacobsen: So, when we first looked at that project, The back of the napkin calculations showed that we needed a fairly large rig for the project. And as we looked at the client's goals for the project and what they were trying to do, the software systems we were using at the time weren't really suited for understanding everything that you need.

Okay. So, our engineering goals was to, you know, number one, have a casing design that isn't going to fail, production loads, drilling loads, all those things. Planning wise, it was to, you know, drill the well on budget or under budget and under time. And when we first looked at it, you know, we felt that we needed a fairly large rig for what we were trying to do. And during the course of The drilling of the first two wells, we were under that assumption.

So, the first two wells we drilled, we had two different rigs. The first rig was kind of what we could get, and that goes back to question one, where it was kind of underpowered for what we were trying to do, and it caused us some issues. The second well that we drilled was a little bit different design, and we had a rig that was actually fit for purpose. It was a perfect size for what we're trying to do, and we didn't have any rig issues at all, and the went mostly according to plan. And from the time that we drilled the second well until we got into a development phase design where we had to basically design the wells for a development project, we had gotten into DrillPlan and we were able to load all the wells and reevaluate what the software is estimating for hook loads as it comes to running casing and drilling loads as well, but mostly running casing. And we found that we had more safety factor than we needed. And we were able to reduce our casing safety factors, which reduced our casing loads a little bit. And we found that we could run a much more common rig than what we had initially anticipated.

So, instead of looking for two or three very specific rigs when there might only be four or five of them in the country, We're able to go to a more common rig design or more common hook load design, as it were. And now we've got our choice of hundreds of rigs instead of just tens. And that's how our goals changed. And the added value had come in rig time and day rig savings. We were able to save upwards of $10,000 a day in our planning.

And that's not insignificant. So, I guess that's a good example of how traditional well-planning approaches can lead to conservative assumptions, which can then be overcome. What typically in your estimation has held teams back and enabled the wrong approach?

Jim Jacobsen: Most of the time, I believe it's you're just doing what the other guy did and you're looking at what was done in the past. In our case, we had some offset wells from many, many years ago that we could look at as to what they had done on their casing design. But also we had an additional requirement from the partners that they had a much more stringent design factor requirement than what was done previously. So, the easy thing would be to just fall back on what other people have done, but I found that A lot of times you can save some money by questioning what other people have done. Just for an example, you could run the design of what other people have done against your own assumptions and say, look, I don't think they need to do whatever it is they're doing. Let's look at a lower cost solution that is just as good, if not better, and cost less. So, you can actually change a project economics by doing something like that. And in the case of our Wyoming project, I think we did because we took you know, $1,000,000 out of each well, which is not insignificant.

Definitely. Why would you look at your neighbors and say, let's do what they've done? Is it a conservative behavioral thing, perhaps? Are there pressures from other sides?

Jim Jacobsen: It's, yeah, that's 100% it. You know, most drilling engineers, they are under pressure to do the same well and less expensive than they did it two days ago. or they're under pressure to start the project quickly. So, the easy button is to look at what other people have done and say, well, we know that works. We know that that's been risked. You presume it's been risked and you just go with that. Because if you do something differently and your well doesn't go according to plan, the first question that management's going to ask is, well, why did you do it differently from the guy next door? If you can't defend that position, then you're gonna look like you're ill prepared for the project. And that's never a position that anybody wants to be in. So, the easy solution is to say, well, those guys over there are doing it this way. Those guys over there are successful. We're under pressure to get this project up and running quickly. The easy button is to go copy what they're doing. And we have the backup to say that if this well doesn't go according to plan or this project doesn't go according to plan, we did it like they did. And we consciously did it like they did because they were successful and we didn't want to have that risk on our hands of doing something completely different.

What in this case made you not take the easy way out?

Jim Jacobsen: In this case, we had time and we had a client that was interested in doing the project in a modern method. using the technology that is available today to leverage and save that time and money with respect to rigs and casing and all that. It ultimately come down to time. We had time to think about it. We had time to risk ideas. We had time to brainstorm. And we had time to really consider, what if we do this? What if we do that? Which way is the best way to go? And because we had time to think about it, we were able to redesign what our initial assumptions were and save the company a lot of money.

When you guys did use that data-driven approach, what changed for you?

Jim Jacobsen: When we saw the expected hook loads that DrillPlan is able to predict, and it was 25% lower than what our back of the napkin calculations were, it really turned on a light for us. It's like, look, we can run essentially the same casing design with a much lower hook load rig, which generally means everything else is a little bit smaller too. If we hadn't been able to load multiple wells at a time and compare the expected hook loads across multiple wells in a short period of time, we would have never, we would have never done that. We'd have stayed with our heavier design and we'd have over purchased a rig. And the opportunity to really predict what you see and then also be able to use what you're predicting against what was done previously. So, we did do that. We did back check the DrillPlan prediction against what we saw with hook loads on the wells that we drilled before we have DrillPlan. And it helped us validate our models. It said, hey, this fits, this matches. So, our future predictive models means that we can run a lighter rig and drill these wells successfully. And without that data opportunity, we'd have never been able to do that.

What do you think the experience in your Wyoming project has revealed about the future of where well planning can go with digital solutions?

Jim Jacobsen: We're able to take our IPT drilling procedure and plug that into every project we do, and it doesn't matter if it is a vertical well, horizontal well, disposal well. The rig processes are the same, so, we're able to take that agnostic approach and apply it to the specific design requirements of any particular well that we drill. And having that ability to easily transfer our process from one project to another is what's really powerful within ProPlant. The way that we used to do it with Excel spreadsheets and Word documents, you would go through this massive cut and paste undertaking and you're paying a drilling engineer a lot of money to do clerical work, cutting and pasting and making sure your project procedure is in the right order. It's got all the right buttons, all the right numbers, and you can very easily make, you know, typos, mistakes, you miscut something. DrillPlan doesn't allow for that. When you build your project, you build your project in DrillPlan, you apply your written word within the template that you've created. You know, say something changes and you go back in and change a number, you change a depth, The old way, you'd have to spend half a day making sure you caught all those depths with DrillPlan. It's just you change the depth and everything gets changed for you. You don't have to go back and change it. You don't have to check it even. It's really allowed the drilling engineer to, number one, work on more projects, and number two, spend more time engineering and doing engineering work for what we pay them to do. So, they're able to use their brain more effectively than it is just a cut and paste project.

What can be better than that? Saving time and money, everybody's a happy bunny.

Jim Jacobsen: Right. And as a consulting company, our margins are based on how many projects we can do with the number of people that we have. I mean, we're like a law firm. We bill hourly. So, if a client can get, in our case, a better product with less time spent on it, then we can do more projects with the same people. So, we're not having to hire and fire people as the market moves up and down. We're able to keep a level head count and do more projects with fewer people. It's really a win-win-win for IPT and our clients.

Jim, that's been a really interesting little case study. Thanks for giving us your opinions on that and insights into how a project can be augmented through digital drilling. We look forward to speaking to you again at some stage in the future.

Jim Jacobsen: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure speaking with everybody. Thank you.