Schlumberger unveils autonomous directional drilling

Offshore staff

HOUSTON – Schlumberger has introduced Autonomous Directional Drilling, which includes solutions to steer autonomously through any section of the wellbore.

“Autonomous Directional Drilling is a significant leap forward for the industry digital transformation, helping our customers achieve new levels of well construction efficiency, consistency and sustainability,” said Jesus Lamas, president, Well Construction, Schlumberger. “Our autonomous vision continues to evolve, with the latest technological innovations enabling a self-steering bottomhole assembly (BHA) capable of drilling through any well section. As one of the four pillars of Autonomous Directional Drilling, downhole automation capabilities drive steering adjustments as conditions are encountered to significantly increase rates of penetration (ROP) and improve borehole quality, which leads to greater production potential and emissions reduction.”

The company said the solutions are built upon four distinct pillars: intelligent planning, intelligent execution, surface automation, and downhole automation.

The company has introduced a downhole automated control system—an advanced and intelligent closed-loop control unit— that acquires, interprets, and acts upon data to drill better wells, faster. The system performs corrections immediately. This ensures drilling trajectory accuracy and removes data-to-surface delays to improve decision latency—resulting in greater overall directional drilling efficiency. Current applications include auto-vertical, auto-tangent, and auto-curve.

In the Middle East, an operator used Autonomous Directional Drilling to drill curves on four wells. The combined solution enabled the operator to reduce downlinks to the rotary steerable system by 49% as compared to offset wells drilled in manual mode, while achieving a 37% increase in ROP.

08/17/2021