Drilling optimization for oil and gas wells

The extended downturn in the Oil & Gas demands sizable expenditure cuts; one way to do so and maintain or improve quality levels is by increasing automation. Deciding the best drilling parameters for optimal rate of penetration (ROP) remains a complicated and highly manual task that can benefit greatly from automation. Moreover, the drilling process is extremely dynamic with many variable and changing parameters that can affect the ROP and overall performance of the rig. Having a deeper understanding of historical data and what affects drilling performance will allow operators to better plan drilling, potentially increase rate of penetration and reduce overall cost of the well.

In this talk, we demonstrate the use of MATLAB to better understand and leverage historical data to optimize the drilling process. The data includes the occurrence (and frequency) of mud motor stalls, downhole wellbore conditions, drilling parameters and the equipment and configurations that have produced the best historical performance. MathWorks products are ideally suited to this workflow as they allow quick investigation of the data and rapid prototyping of algorithms.