In the current economic environment, delivering wells on time and on budget is paramount. Well construction is a significant cost of any field development and it is more important than ever to minimize these costs and to avoid unnecessary lost time and non-productive time. Invisible lost time and non-productive time can represent as much as 40% of the cost of well construction and can lead to more severe issues such as delaying first oil, losing the well or environmental impact. There has been much work developing systems to optimize well construction, but the industry still fails to routinely detect and avoid problematic events such as stuck pipe, kicks, losses and washouts.

Standardizing drilling practice can help also to improve the efficiency, this practice has shown a 30%cost reduction through repetitive and systematic practices, automation becomes the key process to realize it and Machine Learning introduced by new technologies is the key to achieve it.

Drilling data analysis is key to understanding reasons for bad performances and detecting at an early stage potential downhole events. It can be done efficiently to provide to the user tools to look at the well construction process in its whole instead of looking at the last few hours as it is done at the rig site. In order to analyze the drilling data, it is necessary to have access to reliable data in Real-Time to compare with a data model considering the context (BHA, fluids, well geometry). Well planning, including multi-well offset analysis of risks, drilling processes and geology enables a user to look at the full well construction process and define levels of automation.

This paper applies machine learning to a post multi-well analysis of a deepwater field development known for its drilling challenges. Minimizing the human input through automation allowed us to compare offset wells and to define the root cause for non-productive time. In our case study an increase of the pressure while drilling should have led to immediate mitigation measures to avoid a wiper trip.

This paper presents techniques used to systematize surface data analysis and a workflow to identify at an early stage a near pack off which was spotted in an automatic way. The application of this process during operations could have achieved a 10%-time reduction of the section 12 ¼’’.