Innovation Program and Spin off-projects
DigiWells have resulted in several spin-off and verification projects, and an industry-funded innovation program. Together, these projects complement the overall objectives of DigiWells and create significant synergies.
The DigiWells Innovation Program (DIP) is an industry-financed program that will further develop technologies from SFI DigiWells. 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 technology developed will be tested at the unique virtual environment at OpenLab.
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.
Demonstrations are planned in the virtual environment at OpenLab, at the full-scale rig Ullrigg, and at an offshore rig to showcase the developments of interoperability and autonomous drilling.