CRITICAL ISSUES IN DRILLING & COMPLETIONS
Jomax Drilling Rigs 1 and 3 are pictured on a Murphy pad in Canada. Murphy’s onshore approach has focused on deploying
two rigs on the same pad, along with frac crews employed onsite, to help bring new wells online early. This strategy has been
key in helping Murphy accelerate its well delivery process.
nology and drive innovation . Our orga-
nization has become more responsive to
shifts in the digital landscape by adopting
machine learning, cloud computing and
robotic process automation. By adopting
all of that, we’re driving value for our
shareholders and producing more sustain-
able operational practices.
The industry is focused on more data-
driven decisions and supporting more con-
trolled risk experimentation – which leads
to incremental improvement – versus the
more transformational changes that come
from pure innovation. This commitment to
long-term continuous improvement, with
regular assessments and refinements to
our protocols, will help us evolve regard-
less of the volatility of the pricing markets.
However, without standardization
across the industry, I think we’re going to
be challenged to embrace the digital land-
scape in ways that benefit more than just
our company.
There are several examples where we’ve
faced this type of challenge. In 2019, we
created a software program called the
Global Downtime Report that measures
NPT related to drilling, completions and
20 production operations. It was something
we came up with while we were assessing
existing workflows and tools across our
assets at the time. We saw that there was a
need for a consistent visualization of NPT
to help us identify areas of concern and
improve operational downtime.
We had another project where we creat-
ed a digital app for our Safety Observational
Tool. The tool collects and processes safety
observations in real time from our employ-
ees and contractors, analyzes that data
and converts it into various graphs and
visuals that can help us identify hazards,
predict trends, take corrective action and
reinforce desirable behaviors.
The app is available on everyone’s cell
phones and tablets, so that can really help
us speed up the collection of safety data. If
someone spots a hazard in the field, they
can put that information into the app and
give specific details like the date and time
of the hazard, the equipment being used,
the rig, the vendor, the location.
Then there’s the proposed framework
we have for normalizing tags for com-
pletions data with no standard naming
convention, categorization or tracking
method. We complete our onshore wells
through multistage horizontal hydrau-
lic fracturing. A typical well will have
between 20 to 40 stages, and the data set
we compile for each well is comprised of
one Excel file for each stage. Each stage
has time series data for around 150 tags.
With more than 18,000 stages executed,
that’s more than 2.5 million tags. That’s a
lot of tags.
On top of that, the data quality within
each Excel file is inconsistent. Some tags
are referenced differently from well to
well, and this can cause large variances
in the data set. That makes it impos-
sible to run any meaningful analytics
on our completions data. So, we’ve been
working to drive adoption of a standard-
ized tagging framework with our service
partners. Are there any other innovations you’d
like to see around completions?
I would say that we’ve been innovating
our completions onshore at Murphy. With
respect to unconventionals, the majority of
our CAPEX lies within completions, and
JAN UARY/FEB RUARY 2024 • D R I LLI N G CO N T R ACTO R