So-called human-free drilling -- automation of as many routine drilling tasks as possible -- still has a long way to go in practice, although a panel of automation specialists said Wednesday they believe it is close at hand.
As industry has embarked on another rig-building spree in recent months, drillers are looking for greater efficiency and lower costs as well as improved safety, the panel said at the International Association of Drilling Contractors' World Drilling 2011 Conference and Exhibition.
"Safety is absolutely paramount," Jim Rogers, automation adviser for worldwide drilling at big independent operator Apache Corp, said.
"If we don't find more efficient ways to produce assets, we can't produce them. This means we'll need not just incremental performance changes from the past, but step changes."
Rogers noted other industries have automated hazardous jobs. For instance, the auto industry decades ago dealt with hazardous spray-painting chemicals by replacing humans with robots which provides better consistency, quality and safety, he said.
And the defense industry 50 years ago used human pilots for in-air dogfights but now has unmanned drone planes which can be operated remotely, said Rogers.
"Detection of problems and reacting to them faster with automation has a value to safety," Nejm Saadallah, a research engineer at the International Research Institute at Stavanger, Norway, said.
Rogers noted that being struck by objects dropped from heights is among the most common work site fatalities. Despite this, drillers work "underneath 30 meters of steel that can fall out at any time," said Rogers.
"If those guys can be one or two miles away from their processes, why not?" he said. "If we instrument newbuild rigs to where we can see what's going on with the rig [at a distance], we can relocate a work crew and get them away from the hazards."
The barriers to doing this are not lack of knowledge, capability, standards, technology or incentives. Instead, the chief obstacle is "resistance -- people keep doing the same thing because they like doing it the way they've always done it."
Larger-scale rig drilling automation has to start somewhere, and it may not be with service companies, said Rogers, because the likely source is the player providing the overall project integration: the operator.
"Only the project initiator -- the operator -- has that kind of overview," he said. "I think to get there we'll need demonstration projects where parties are invited to work in partnership. We've seen some examples of this."
Shell, Apache and Statoil have been among the leaders in this, he added.
"There's not many of them [demonstration projects], but it has been done and I think it will grow," he said. "In my view, this... is coming soon and it's coming to a rig near you."
However, completely "human-free" drilling is probably not an inevitable, nor even desirable, function, said Svein Ove Aanesland, product line director of control systems for National Oilwell Varco.
Unlike the auto industry, oil drilling is not 100% predictive, Aanesland said. "A degree of human interaction is necessary for analysis. The grunt work can be automated, but analytical decisions may need approval by humans."
