Faced with the continuous complexities of deepwater well construction, ExxonMobil Guyana Limited and SLB joined forces to transform the landscape for offshore operations in Guyana.
The objective was to overcome the demands of navigating intricate 3D well trajectories, where precision, consistency, and speed are critical to success and traditional operations demand continual human oversight and leave little room for error.
By joining forces, the two companies aimed to develop new approaches to enhance operational efficiency, improve well delivery, and set higher standards for safety and performance in deepwater environments.
To accelerate well delivery, ExxonMobil Guyana Limited elected to deploy a number of digital tools. On the directional drilling side, Neuro™ autonomous directional drilling enhanced trajectory control through autonomous updates and requesting downlink commands in a closed-loop fashion. This ensured that directional drilling operations were streamlined, minimizing the total number of downlinks required and increasing the rate of penetration (ROP) of the remaining on-bottom downlinks.
DrillOps automation managed rig surface equipment, including mud pumps, drawworks, and top drive, automating all on-bottom drilling tasks. This included automating downlinks, continuously adapting parameters to minimize drilling dysfunctions, preemptively detecting and reacting to issues such as overpressure or drilling instability, and constantly computing downhole formation strength to select the optimal parameters to maximize ROP.
Together, the solutions were able to successfully navigate more than 48 km of some of the most complex 3D well paths in a fully autonomous, closed-loop fashion all monitored remotely from an onshore center. More than 93% of operations were executed autonomously, leading to reduced flat time and improving wellbore positioning accuracy. Since implementation, controlled-ROP downlinks have decreased by 51% and off-bottom downlinks by 75% accelerating well construction and offering a more precise trajectory.
These digital solutions enabled ExxonMobil Guyana Limited to maximize to maximize the efficiency of their remote operations, reducing personnel on board (POB), increasing performance consistency, and creating a scalable model that could be replicated more broadly.
