Page 15 - Practical Well Planning and Drilling Manual

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Introduction

The drilling industry is changing rapidly in the areas of technolo-
gy, safety, environment, management, contractual relationships, train-
ing, etc. The driving forces are largely economic; there are probably few
giant fields left undiscovered (especially in mature areas) and therefore
the search moves to frontier areas and to exploiting smaller fields.
Increased government regulations also play a large part. All of these
factors increase the cost to discover and produce hydrocarbons. Add to
this the pressure of low oil prices, and we are expected to continually
reduce costs while improving drilling and production performance. We
have to become more efficient by improving our skills and by develop-
ing new technologies and ways of working.
Computers have also caused dramatic changes for us. The comput-
ing power now available means that, if properly used, computers can
help us to make better decisions. We can store, access, analyze, and
summarize huge volumes of data and make complex calculations easy,
even for the nonmathematically inclined. The downside is that some
engineers use their PCs as a senior partner to make decisions for them
rather than as a tool to help them make better-informed decisions them-
selves. This trend is increasing for reasons that I will come to shortly.
Early in the 1990s, operators and drilling contractors slowed down
or stopped their ongoing training programs. This was largely due to
low oil prices and high drilling costs. With less activity, many skilled
people left the industry. The accountants decided that funds spent on
training should be assigned elsewhere (perhaps on recruiting more
accountants?) and so the major sources of highly trained, well-round-
ed drilling people dried up. To continue operating, new contracting
schemes transferred responsibility from the operators to the contrac-
tors. This led to an exodus of people from the operators to the con-
tractors and into the consulting market, depleting those skills within

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