INPEX has been leveraging digital technologies in the drilling and completion sector since 2019. The development of data acquisition and prediction capabilities enables addressing complex challenges, with the integration of machine learning. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of remote operations and automation, leading to advancements in drilling system automation. Digitalization and autonomous control are crucial, demanding high-precision data attributes. Digital transformation（DX）technologies play a vital role in the development of composite technologies for autonomous control.

INPEX focuses on optimizing drilling operations and preventing issues by actively engaging in collaborative research and consortiums. The report highlights project outcomes, challenges, and future directions. Emphasizing the importance of data processing and understanding phenomena, the establishment of drilling parameter models is critical. Automation and efficiency improvements in drilling systems, along with the potential of machine learning, have been explored. Addressing the challenges of high-quality data collection and black box approaches, the industry as a whole has been striving for automated control and efficiency improvements, expanding the scope of machine learning applications. INPEX is committed to utilizing digital technologies for operational optimization, including remote office setups, leveraging technical data, and implementing AI-based document search.

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.

JOGMEC has been restructured for adopting the necessity to the many requests regarding carbon neutrality. Originally JOGMEC has been treating “Oil and Gas Upstream and Stockpiling”, “Metal Mining”, “Domestic Geothermal Development” and “Coal Mining” recently, “Carbon Capture and Storage（CCS）”, “Hydrogen and Ammonia” and “Wind Power Generation” have been recently added to the function of JOGMEC.

Regarding CCS, JOGMEC has been able to treat the CCS projects which have no relation with upstream development after the restructuring.

JOGMEC is getting active for the CCS projects from the technical point of view. JOGMEC has established the CCS guideline in Japanese language and released the website “Clean Future Energy”, which explains the recent technologies, including CCS.

JOGMEC is also involved in some CCS projects domestically as well as overseas. JOGMEC is keen to evaluate the well integrity for the upcoming CCS projects.

We would like to introduce well engineering activities which are related to CCS projects.

JAPEX drilled a multi-lateral, multi-layer completion well in the Katakai gas field in 2022-2023. The well was designed as a multilateral well to access two targets located several hundred meters from a single new wellhead in the well pad, and to enable production from another reservoir above the multilateral section to enhance the value of a single wellbore.

At the beginning of well design study stage, a number of issues to realize the well design described above were identified that needed to be resolved, and measures were developed to address them, including the procurement of materials and equipment for contingency cases, which were then incorporated into an action plan.

As a result, the drilling operations could be completed without having to switch to the contingency case.

This paper presents the main issues identified during the well study phase and the drilling operation results.

Abu Dhabi Oil Co., Ltd. (ADOC）is currently operating four oil fields offshore in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, the oldest field of which has been producing for more than 50 years utilizing mainly electrical submersible pump (ESP）systems since 1973. Due to being a brown field, there are some inactive wells due to low oil production as a result of increase in water cut and mechanical deterioration of wellbore. For efficient wellbore utilization and to improve oil recovery, relatively challenging workover operations including re-entry horizontal drilling, sidetrack, change completion zone etc are required. This paper presents an example of one worked over well which was identified to be difficult to sidetrack and horizontally drill, introducing the stages from planning to the actual execution.

Well intervention is a well operation for the existing well to enhance productivity or injectivity. Today, the well activity is increased in the late life oil and gas asset and CCS/CCUS project. Thus, the demand of well intervention to existing wells is expected to increase. Slickline, wireline and coil tubing are common methodologies for well intervention purpose, and the several new technologies are developed. Digital slickline newly enable accurate depth control by downhole measurement real-time monitoring, and electrical control of downhole equipment. Wireline tractor powered intervention technology allows shifting operation, hole cleaning and milling operation. Real-time coil tubing technology enabled by fiber optic cable achieves the accurate depth control and real-time fluid pumping optimization for well stimulation operation by monitoring downhole measurement. Those new technologies contribute not only to decrease operation footprint and lead time, but also decrease operational green-house-gas emission.

This paper introduces a successful emergency abandonment project for a legacy well in shallow water. The project involved significant safety and commercial risks due to a high concentration of hydrogen-sulfide（H₂S）, the decay and uncertainty of well condition, resulting from corrosion and erosion damages to tubulars and wellhead equipment, as well as a lack of well information. The well, which had been suspended at the mud-line in 1978, suddenly experienced oil leakage due to the deteriorated condition of its mud-line suspension（MLS）cap. The primary challenge was to newly design and install an emergency MLS cap to contain the oil leakage from the corroded original MLS cap. The second challenge involved safely re-entering the wellbore for permanent abandonment.

To address the primary challenge, a subsea starter wellhead was installed over a non-API 30-1/2 inch OD conductor casing cut stub just above the seabed, effectively ceasing the oil leakage. The second challenge was overcome by installing an additional BOP（bottom BOP）onto the subsea starter wellhead. This was completed by a low-pressure marine riser, surface wellhead equipment, and a surface BOP（top BOP）.

By successfully addressing these challenges, the emergency abandonment project demonstrated effective strategies for containing oil leakage from a legacy, high H₂S oil well and executing the permanent abandonment operations.

Our company, INPEX CORPORATION, has operated oil and gas development worldwide for more than 50 years. Since the introduction of HSE Management System in 2006, we have developed our safety culture for our international operations. However, through the internal review of our safety performance, we identified some challenging areas for improvement. To identify necessary actions for raising our safety performance, we decided to evaluate the level of safety culture for our entire company, and each operation worldwide.

We adopted a safety culture assessment tool based on a technique developed in Japan. This tool has been utilized at over 250 locations in and outside Japan with total of more than 80000 people over a period of 10 years, which has proven to be beneficial for the identification of strengths and weaknesses of each organization.

We prepared the online questionnaire with 110 questions in Japanese and English. The survey was open from October 2020 to January 2021, during which we collected 2441 responses from 10 countries including Japan, Australia and Indonesia. We then analyzed the responses together with the university.

We started a series of analyses from the results of the principal component analysis provided from the university, then conducted a series of analysis by safety culture related keywords, as well as the analysis of the response to individual questions related to some items which we considered to be important for improving our safety culture. This analysis helped us find strength and weakness of the whole company, as well as those of each location, so we could identify the area to be focused for the improvement.

This survey was our first attempt within our company to measure the safety culture for the large population of our organizations worldwide, which turned out to be beneficial for identifying actions for the continual improvement.

Natural gas dissolved in water（GDW）is a common form of hydrocarbon occurrence in Japan, and gas production from the GDW accounts for 23％ of total natural gas production in the country. Nakajo field located in Niigata prefecture is one of the fields which has long production history from the GDW reservoir. However, as GDW sandstone itself has not been well understood in aspect of the petrophysics and rock physics behavior, it was a new finding that gas-effect response was observed from well logs in the GDW sandstone. In this paper, we review petrophysical analysis result and demonstrate rock physics modelling, fluid substitutions, synthetic seismogram calculations, wedge modelling and AVO modelling for GDW sandstone. The result of petrophysical analysis indicated presence of isolated gas in GDW sandstone, and the rock physics modelling revealed presence of isolated gas in there. Besides, water saturation estimated from rock physics modelling was regarded as useful tool to detect GDW reservoir with gas isolation according to similarity of the water saturation estimated from rock physics modelling and the mud gas readings（total gas and methane）. An application to seismic data is also encouraged to detect isolated gas in GDW sandstone according to synthetic seismogram calculations and AVO modelling. These outcomes allow a better evaluation approach of the surrounding area where future exploration and development potential may exist. Finally, although conclusion remains equivocal, we discuss a few possible situations to explain the existence of isolated gas in GDW sandstone reservoir.