Drilling advances: Is it always only about people?

Refer to my last column 'What is the Performance Twist-Off cost?' if you are interested in the complete story. I try to make each of these helpful as stand-alone missives, but there is a red thread running through them all, and prior articles might be useful for newreaders. 

Summarizing very briefly, in the past 10 years, drilling HAS advanced A LOT.  In fact, by the productivity measure of average feet per day, drilling in the U.S. has advanced by 230%—that’s a compounded rate of 8.5% per year.  Ten years ago, rigs made wells at an average of ~450 ft/day.  In 2023, rigs averaged ~1,050 ft/day.  That’s good… very good.  Without this improvement, the shale revolution would not have been possible—or certainly not as big.   

But there’s a fly in the ointment:  when activity increases, performance regresses—a lot. I’ve been calling this regression the “Performance Twist-Off.” In the past 15 years, the industry has left between $11,000,000,000 and $22,000,000,000 on the table (all those zeros look more impressive than a “B”).  AND, this isn’t just about money either; safety performance regresses (e.g. Fatality Rate increases) as activity increases. Figure 1 summarizes the gist (see past columns for the safety data).   

Fig. 1. U.S. drilling performance and change in activity with estimated loss, due to “Twist-Offs.”

This variation with performance vs. activity shows that we can get even better by preventing these Twist-Offs.  In the past column, I presented two ways people are working to prevent the Twist-Off: Automation and Level Loading.  Future columns will dig deeper into these approaches and how well they are working. This column will introduce a third way to prevent (or at least mitigate) Performance Twist-Offs: reliably developing and assuring crew competency.    

A side note about the word “competency.” Different people use different words to describe the concept I’m talking about here—skill, capability, proficiency, expertise, ability… I use “competency,” because the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the ability to do something successfully or efficiently.” That’s what I’m talking about.. the ability to successfully and efficiently drill wells. If that word bothers you for some reason, substitute the one you like below. 

How do we know that competency is an issue? When activity increases, average drilling performance declines—every time. It’s logical to think it might be due to equipment quality.  I’m sure that bringing a stacked rig (either hot or cold) back has an effect on performance. But it is clearly more than that, because history shows that industry has had higher performance with even more rigs than in the past. So, more rigs do not automatically mean worse performance.  Regression in safety performance, as activity increases, also supports the point that it’s about people working successfully and efficiently—competency—not just equipment. In any event, the challenges of bringing a stacked rig back to work is compounded by a new crew.  

Drilling is a team sport—no one can possibly do it alone. Newly formed teams, or teams with new members, don’t perform as well as they do after practice. That’s why sports teams practice. We also know that it’s not entirely equipment-related, because just a few years later—before the rig fleet has time to turn over much—the industry is doing much better than it did before. Why?  Because the “Crew” is able drill successfully and efficiently... it is more competent.   

When I use the word “Crew,” here, it’s not just about drilling rig personnel. Drilling rig personnel obviously have a very key role in delivering drilling performance—maybe THE key role. But when things go right or wrong on a drilling operation; it is not just due to the drilling rig personnel. Things go wrong or right, when everyone on the team organizes to build wells safely, effectively and efficiently.  The larger drilling crew includes service company, vendors, logistical and support personnel, operator well team members, and the larger project team, which includes our brothers and sisters in the geosciences, production, facilities, and business disciplines. All of these folks work together to add the most value from the project as a whole. All of them need to do their part to make things “successful and efficient.”  

A side note about focusing on average feet per day as performance metric:  Drilling performance is not just about the time to drill the well or even well cost itself - those are important for CAPEX, but OPEX and Well Productivity are also key to being ‘successful and efficient’.  The point here is that this competency thing goes beyond the drilling rig crew itself – this makes managing all this harder, but I think makes the point I’m raising here even more important. 

When things go well it’s largely because someone on the larger Crew did the right thing, and when they don’t go as well as possible it’s also largely because someone on the larger Crew did something wrong or forgot to do something right, building and assuring competency is a key part addressing the ‘Performance Twist-off’.  The fact that the Twist-off exists also means if we could be better at better building and assuring Competency as activity changes we can add value… and the analysis in Figure 1 shows the size of the prize isn’t trivial. 

One well-documented & successful benchmark. We can look at high reliability benchmarks like aviation and nuclear power, or maybe the military with its Task-Condition-Standard approach as benchmarks, and we can profitably learn from these examples. But, we don’t have to look outside the industry to find how we might improve. One good example is the Halliburton CREW program (Halliburton CREW means Competent Resources Executing Work). I know of several organizations in our industry that have laudable efforts in this area, but Halliburton has done the industry a service by writing several papers describing their approach in detail, what’s worked, and where the key issues in being successful are.  

Jorge Leuro (now with ConocoPhillips) and Todd Kruger have published several papers (SPE166638, IPTC17353, IPTC17946), describing Halliburton’s journey and what they think are the keys to success. To be fair, Jorge and Todd built on the also-published work by Dave Demski and Ken Arabie, who also deserve some recognition.   

I can’t go into all the ins and outs of their journey or details of their approach.  But I will try to highlight some of the key elements of their approach. The main take-aways, as I see them, are: 1) It is possible to show real business results with a deliberate program to build and assure competence in one part of the drilling crew; and 2) It’s a bit harder than you might think to get it right, or at least there are specific things your organization will need to deliberately attend to, to be successful.  Certainly a successful program is not just offering a few classes to employees (formal training probably is part of the solution, but it is only part).   

The good news first: Figure 2 shows Jorge’s and Todd’s main conclusion: “that developing the workforce with the competency program provides a clear return on the investment.”  Safety, cost of poor quality (COPQ), and staff turnover are all measurably improved as a result of starting the program. It can be done. 

Fig. 2. Halliburton “CREW” program performance metrics, from start of program rollout, Leuro & Kruger, IPTC17946.

Now, maybe the “bad news”… it’s not that simple to get it right. Specific things need to be done to achieve results like this, and it requires deliberate effort on the part of many folks in the organization. Jorge and Todd’s papers describe what they did to achieve these results. There’s not enough space to describe all the details here, but SOME of the keys to achieving these results (as I see them) were scalable processes for: 

• Defining competencies for specific jobs–they needed to be fit for purpose and detailed.   
• Providing tools and time to develop employees, including having the employee as the focus of the program; accountable for their own competency development.  
• Verifying individual assessments with roles for assessors, line management, and verifiers. 
• Leadership behaviors to support effective competency development and assurance. 
• Managing competency information, so as to make the system not the issue.   

One more important finding from their published work: it’s not just about training and competency.  They show through their work that employee engagement has a multiplier effect. Competency management is good, engaging employees… both together are better. I think this means the challenges of addressing the Twist-Off need to extend beyond competency to culture. That’s a topic for another day. 

I believe, and think, history shows that improving how we build and assure competency can play a key role in preventing future Twist-Offs, but I’ve just introduced the topic here and suggested some possible ways to build and assure competency.  Jorge and Todd’s SPE papers do a much better job than me in this short column. I recommend you read those, if you want to find out more (SPE166638, IPTC 17353, and IPTC 17946).  In future columns, I plan to further explore the role technology, process and people play in advancing drilling.   

Until next time, I hope to start a conversation with any of you on how we can all help Drilling Advance. If you have any ideas, please email me at ford.brett@petroskills.com, and I promise I’ll respond.   

About the Authors

Ford Brett, P.E.

Contributing Editor

Ford Brett, P.E. , is CEO of PetroSkills. He has consulted in over 45 countries, been granted >35 patents, authored >40 technical publications, and has served as an SPE Distinguished Lecturer, as well as on the on the SPE Board as Drilling and Completions Technical Director.