Predictive Drilling

Overview

Cheaper wells with more production

Drilling through narrow beds of hydrocarbons isn’t easy -- a few feet in the wrong direction and the well won’t produce as much oil as it should. Drill too far out of zone, and you have to start a new borehole, costing millions. Unfortunately, most drilling techniques can’t look very far ahead of the drill bit, so just like a driver with no headlights, a lot of expensive mistakes are made. Better predictive analytics reduce drilling risk and drilling costs, and increase the amount of recoverable oil and gas in the well.

The Challenge

• Most traditional drilling visualization and analytics are focused on conventional vertical wells. Designing an intuitive experience and data model to co-visualize regional geology, logging-while-drilling data, and predictive analytics in deviated and horizontal boreholes was a real challenge not addressed by existing software.
  
• Previous software teams had attempted the problem, but found it too difficult to build real-time updating visualizations in a browser, for easy use by staff on a bandwidth-constrained (satellite) drilling site wifi, as well as geologists and explorers back at company headquarters.

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Our Solution

Expero designed the user experience for a complex data-driven analytics package in just three months, enabling implementation for a time-sensitive customer. Expero’s strong oil & gas experience was critical in making sure the design met the common challenges in subsurface software: complex data driven visualization, coordinated displays of information, large data volumes, and competing user demands from expert personas.