Driving cultural change: digital enablement of emissions reduction in well construction

Abstract

Digitalization plays a key role in improving a company’s ability to operate safely, efficiently, and responsibly. A critical challenge for the Exploration and Production（E&P）companies is planning and drilling safe and optimal wells whilst considering the emissions impacts of the well design and optimizing it for reduced greenhouse gas（GHG）emissions. With emissions in the spotlight, the E&P companies are currently facing increasing pressure to reduce emissions. Companies are commonly required to track, forecast, and reduce carbon emissions across their business lifecycles. A cultural shift is required across the E&P companies to make emissions reporting and low-carbon decision a part of the workflow of technical engineering. The current way of tracking emissions does not aid this cultural shift, as it is typically through spreadsheets and dashboards, separated from existing ways of working and inflexible to regularly changing emissions standards. The drilling of wells is an emissions intensive process where low carbon decision making could make important impacts on carbon discharge. Through digitalization efforts, “Planning a well in a day” has been made an achievable goal through having a corporate, standardized workflow in an integrated cloud-hosted system. This same digital well design platform can also join the well planning workflows and carbon emissions estimates together. Potential GHGs from direct and indirect emission sources can be computed dynamically during the well planning phase, with emissions factors and reporting standards derived from libraries centrally controlled by sustainability organizations. This allows engineers to transition to a new culture by considering the carbon emissions impacts of their well plan, providing efficient and transparent emission reports to stakeholders, and driving reduced-emissions decision making.