Seeing Ahead of the Drill Bit

With more than 60 drilling apps, Corva users have quite an arsenal to choose from.  We’ve built a drilling optimization app for many workflows across the rig and that list is still growing.  Over the last couple of years some of those apps have become true rock stars, like our Driller’s Roadmap and BHA Optimization apps.  There’s a common thread among these killer apps that involves harnessing historical data to optimize the task at hand, whether that’s mining offsets for lessons learned or picking the best BHA.

For Corva users, this shouldn’t come as a surprise but there’s a new killer app on the drilling optimization scene.  Introduced about six months ago, Corva’s Parameter Comparison app may have a modest name but it’s powering up drilling efficiency and helping drillers crush it every time.

If this were a video game, we might have called our Parameter Comparison app “Follow the Leader,” with the goal being to match the current target well drilling parameters to those of the best-performing offset wells.  Corva users have a variety of tools to identify best-in-class offsets, such as our Metrics Engine app.  The beauty of the Parameter Comparison app is that it is built to feed drillers the best-performing parameters for each formation and hole section, providing instant feedback on whether they are matching performance and enabling them to optimize ROP and slide percentage in real time.

From the app, users see the target well and offset tracks stacked below for a side-by-side comparison.  By default, the depth range is set to the past 100 ft. of drilling with the difference between offset and target well displayed as a percentage or median.  Tracks can be easily added for the following parameters:

The Parameter Comparison app can also be viewed in either measured Depth or True Vertical Depth mode.  Switching to TVD can help compensate for formation dips.

Perhaps the most powerful feature of the Parameter Comparison app is the Look Ahead toggle, akin to switching on the light in a dark room.  When Look Ahead is turned on the screen will plot a desired depth ahead of the current target well’s position.  This enables drillers to essentially see the best-in-class offset parameters ahead of the drill bit, enabling them to anticipate upcoming parameter adjustments – WOB, RPM, torque, etc. – and better match those best performing parameters.

The industry has long struggled with drilling consistency and applying lessons learned, often resulting in best practices from a drilling project being lost six months down the road.  With Corva, drillers finally have both a means of automatically capturing best practices and an efficient method for implementing them with our Parameter Comparison app.  Those best-in-class parameters could come from a few parent wells drilled a year earlier or they might be a combination of historical and wells drilled on the same pad.  By switching the Parameter Comparison app from real-time to historical mode, drillers can perform look back analysis after drilling each well on a pad, making the last well even better than the first.