DigiWells Innovation Program

The DigiWells Innovation Program (DIP) is an industry-financed program that will further develop technologies from SFI DigiWells, a NORCE-led centre for Research-based Innovation. The initial focus will be on autonomous drilling and interoperability. 

The innovation program is fully funded by the industry through support from AkerBP, ConocoPhillips, Equinor, Petrobras, TotalEnergies and Vår Energi. It will accelerate development and industrialization of drilling and well technology and improve standards with the goal of increasing efficiency, reducing costs and risk, and improve safety. This will be achieved through the execution of projects with frequent demonstrations. 

The explosion of automation solutions and players, which in itself is very positive, has made clear the lack of interoperability within the drilling ecosystem.

– We work towards a "develop once - deploy everywhere"-philosophy. Our goal is to increase both interoperability, security and efficiency, and we are very excited to continue our work with our industry partners, says Erlend Vefring, centre director at DigiWells.

Board of the chair at DigiWells, Tron Golder Kristiansen from Aker BP, emphasizes that the industry needs to evolve:

– One of the enablers to evolve, or change our industry is digitalization and the technology being developed at DigiWells, says Kristiansen.

Activities in DIP will be based on earlier developments and demonstration of autonomous drilling performed at Ullrigg in a project entitled “Autonomous Drilling – Phase I”. 

By autonomous system we here mean the highest level of automation, namely a system that can adapt to changing environments and changing goals, to learn both from experience and on-the-fly, and to make appropriate choices given perceptual limitations and finite computation. 

The system drilled 500 m completely autonomously with very challenging unexpected situations occurring from the first day of the experiments and without any incident not being recovered from. 

After the demonstration it was concluded that: 

• Further work is required before the system can be made available
• Aspects related to how to best convey information to users, and human factors when taking into use such an autonomous decision-making system, need to be addressed 

These challenges will be addressed in DIP. 

Industrial initiatives such as the D-WIS (Drilling and Wells Interoperability Standards) organization represent a development front for the drilling community. An ambition of activities in DIP is to specify and implement requirements for fully interoperable autonomous solutions and be actively involved in D-WIS. 

These endeavors are expected to facilitate the vision “develop once and deploy anywhere,” significantly impacting the industry and simplifying the implementation of automation solutions.