Without a thorough and systematic well planning process, you’re in trouble – you can’t hope to understand how long it will take to reach the targets in your field, from the lead times for getting equipment in the country and on site, to the process of drilling the wells themselves.
That’s when wells run over schedule, standby costs start mounting, and teams become stressed trying to keep the ship afloat.
In other words, without a well planning process that’s fit for purpose, you can’t survive.
That’s especially true for smaller, newer operators – but it’s one thing to know the importance of well planning, it’s another to actually know how to design the process, and how to set your firm up to design and apply it effectively every time.
What is a well-designed well planning process?
Before we get too far into what foundations a well planning process needs, let’s first go over what well planning actually is.
Typically, the well planning process needs to start with the generation of a target hopper. After all, it’s not just a process for planning the drilling of the well. It’s for planning everything you will need in order to get that well in the ground – including equipment, people and data – and that has to start with understanding what kinds of targets you have on the table.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all. The well planning process has to be appropriate for your field, your situation and the types of wells you need to drill.
Often you’ll want to design multiple well planning processes, each one tailored to the different types of wells you need to drill and the execution timelines in front of you.
How long should your well planning process take?
More often than not, this means the well planning process should begin several years out from the intended spud date.
For example, say your process is currently designed to start a year out from the intended spud date. That’s all well and good – until you find out that the equipment you need to drill your new wells has a two-year lead time. Now your wells are behind schedule before you’ve even really begun, and your field is generating more standby costs when it should be producing oil.
However, we say “more often than not” because it’s not the case that every well will take years to move from a target in a hopper to reality. Sometimes events can take an unexpected turn and you find yourself needing to do a year’s worth of planning in a fortnight – and you need to access the kind of quality-at-speed usually reserved for licensing rounds. Or perhaps you’re later in a field’s life cycle<link to blog 01 when published> and more focused on linking existing wells to new targets, and so you only need a few weeks for each one.
When you review your current well planning timeline, check whether your planning process actually starts where it says it should. In other words, is Decision 1 actually the first decision in the process, or have you had to tack on a Decision 0 or a Decision -1 over the years to account for variables as they crop up?
Is your firm’s structure suited to well planning?
Like so much in a business, the process can either be helped or hamstrung by how your firm is organised, and how many siloes have emerged as the company has grown.
The subsurface team might be responsible for the bulk of the well planning process, but they still need to get data from drilling teams, lead times from procurement, timelines from commercial and so on. If too many institutional walls prevent them from talking easily to other departments, any process they set up is going to be incomplete.
Siloes happen in every organisation for a multitude of reasons, and sometimes you might not even realise they’ve appeared until you see the symptoms.
Perhaps it’s simply that all of your teams are housed in the same building, but the subsurface team on the tenth floor doesn’t want to keep heading down to the drilling team on the sixth floor to discuss wells.
Timezones can be an easy culprit in our industry – we’ve seen one case where the subsurface team creating the drilling requirements were three timezones away from the drilling engineers designing the well, making communication between the two units drawn out and all but ineffective.
It has to be said that smaller organisations are less susceptible to siloes like these – the fewer people you have in a team, the easier it is to have everyone on the same floor or pull them all together around a workstation.
That said, smaller firms are by no means immune to the forming of silos, and when you see walls holding back your well planning, it’s the role of leadership to turn up with a sledge hammer.
Is the culture of your team suited to well planning?
It’s perhaps contradictory to say this – especially in such a high-cost, high-stakes industry as ours is – but risk-taking is a crucial and often overlooked part of the well planning process. And risk-taking can easily be smothered by an unhelpful culture.
For the avoidance of doubt, when we talk about taking risks here, we’re talking about being prepared to try new techniques for drilling wells or reaching targets. It’s not so much about going after risky sources of oil and more about being open to trying something new.
It’s easy to see why this can be difficult for operators to manage. We’ve seen our fair share of firms under so much pressure to deliver promised productivity that they shy away from trying anything they haven’t done before.
Perhaps there’s a strong blame culture in place and the threat of losing your bonus if a project doesn’t deliver. Or perhaps it’s a case of death by documentation, where each and every step in the process has been prescribed with no space for people to challenge the orthodox.
But in order to be a first-class well planner, you need to be able to evolve your well planning process in line with the field, to accept that what’s best practice today won’t be best practice tomorrow – in short, you need your people to be ready to take a few risks.
At Rockflow, our team of experts can lend their technical mastery to help smaller operators put well planning process foundations in place.
We can work with subsurface and wells teams to interrogate their current well planning practice and give guidance on the entire process, from hopper generation through to post-well review. We can also help prepare teams for stepping beyond the status quo by advising them on what different technology options are available and how best to apply them for different projects.
