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PETROLEUM DIRECTORY: Doyon Drilling: Meeting the challenges of a changing industry Contractor adapts to the mature Alaska oil province Alan Bailey Petroleum Directory Contributing Writer
The ever-changing Alaska oil and gas industry continues to bring fresh challenges and new opportunities for drilling contractors. Doyon Drilling Inc., an Alaska-owned contractor, overcomes the challenges through flexibility, innovation and operational improvement. The company first started its operations on the North Slope when it spearheaded use of self-propelled drilling rigs in 1981. Since then the company has established a fleet of five purpose-built, Arctic rigs.
Although Doyon Drilling built its rigs several years ago, the company continues to upgrade equipment to efficiently support the most advanced and difficult drilling operations, Ron Wilson, general manager of Doyon Drilling, told Petroleum News.
“We've done a lot of work keeping the rigs up to speed, with new equipment or whatever it takes to keep them in good shape,” Wilson said. “We definitely need to keep the North Slope successful in the programs that we go after.”
For example, the company recently upgraded the mud equipment and top drive on its Rig 14, to land a five-year drilling contract with BP.
“(This year) we signed a five year contract for ... rig 14 with BP to drill in the Milne Point and Prudhoe Bay fields,” Wilson said. “That was pretty significant — we haven't seen long-term contracts like that for quite a while.” Modifications to Rig 19 Last year the company made some extensive modifications to its Rig 19 to enable this rig to cross ice bridges over land routes. The use of land routes eliminates the extra cost and time required to move the rig across the sea ice.
“We needed to reduce the weight (of Rig 19) from about 2.2 million pounds back to 1.1 million pounds,” Wilson said. “... we came up with this idea ... to design some type of mechanism to slide the whole rig floor and derrick off in one piece.” A transporter would then carry the derrick and rig floor separately from the rest of the rig, thus enabling the rig to move as two loads, each half of the weight of the entire rig.
In a first-of-a-kind design, the company developed a scissors mechanism powered by hydraulic rams to lift the derrick off the sub-base and onto the transporter.
Last winter the modified rig crossed some ice bridges to move from the Alpine field into Kuparuk.
“For exploration purposes, time is a critical factor — we can ... have (the rig) down and ready to move in 12 hours,” Wilson said. New drilling techniques Although drilling activity on the North Slope has diminished recently, companies like Doyon Drilling have been establishing new work by helping the oilfield operators find ways of developing new oil reservoirs. Much recent effort has focussed on developing heavy oil deposits in shallow sands.
“Ten years ago it wasn't economic — they weren't having real high success and the (flow) rates ... to develop and go after this heavy oil,” Wilson said. “Today with the success that we’re having it’s looking more promising that the sand with the heavy oil can get developed.”
Horizontal directional drilling has proved the key to developing heavy oil, Wilson said. By drilling two or more wells horizontally through different sand bodies from a single well bore, it’s possible to increase flow rates of heavy oil to a point where production becomes economic. Horizontal wells extend laterally several thousand feet — Doyon Drilling is currently stretching the limits by drilling a 7,000-foot lateral hole.
Todd Driskill, Doyon Drilling's operations manager, stressed that drilling companies, mud companies and the manufacturers of downhole tools have all contributed to the success of horizontal drilling. New oil production techniques such as the use of jet pumps have also played a pivotal role in the economics of developing heavy oil.
“A lot of the credit needs to go to the production side of it,” Driskill said. “... it was an early, early issue — how do we get this oil out of the ground?” Driving costs down Reducing drilling costs has also become a critical factor in the North Slope's mature oil province — with Doyon Drilling's efficient rigs and experienced drilling teams, high-speed operations translate directly into cost savings.
“Getting these costs down is a critical piece,” Wilson said. “If we can get these wells drilled cheap, successfully and with enough oil coming back, that's going to keep drilling open ... for quite some time.”
Driskill sees careful planning as the key to improving efficiency.
“The main driver for (keeping costs down) is the planning side of it ... finding what’s worked, getting input from all facets,” Driskill said, “... then paying attention to that input and making that (part of) standard operating procedures for the next well.” We've reduced costs by 30 to 40 percent just with improved operating procedures, he said.
Doyon has also been trimming costs by pioneering new ways of disposing of well cuttings — the rock fragments that come out of the well bore. There’s a big cost associated with the traditional technique of grinding the cuttings in a ball mill and re-injecting them into the subsurface, Wilson said.
In some situations, Doyon has been able to wash and test the rock fragments for use as gravel on roads and pads. The company has also purchased an ultrasonic processor that pulverizes the clay and shale components of the cuttings, so that these components can be incorporated back into the drilling mud.
“It’s been pretty successful and we’ve been able to drive down the costs on waste disposal,” Wilson said. The importance of people With performance improvement mainly dependent on skilled and motivated staff, Driskill thinks that attitudes towards work have changed markedly over the years.
“A lot of our guys ... are really involved in the project — they really take a pride in what they're doing. It's not just a job to most of them,” Driskill said.
As part of its focus on people, Doyon Drilling runs its own training program. Training covers the gamut from safety and environmental procedures to instruction in specific drilling techniques. Some training supports the safety and environmental requirements of individual customers.
Learning from experience and then providing thorough training both assist Doyon Drilling's environmental management system or EMS. In EMS, standard operational procedures and electronic document control ensure compliance with all environmental regulations.
And that, in turn feeds back to improved safety and operational efficiency.
“If you look at the (safety) statistics we're doing better than the average for land rigs for Alaska and the Lower 48,” Wilson said. Information interchange throughout the industry in recent years has also made a major contribution to safety, Wilson said.
“Our industry’s changed a lot for the better,” Wilson said. “We work a lot closer with our operator and our competitors as well ... we share what took place, what we can do to make sure that this doesn't re-occur ... make sure that we've got the right things in place.”
So, with the potential for future exploration in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and the remoter parts of northern Alaska, Doyon Drilling can respond to whatever the industry needs. The company's depth of experience on the North Slope enables it to meet the challenges of Arctic drilling.
“We're Alaska owned and we're here to stay, we're not going anywhere,” Driskill said, “and that's where our business has got to be.”
Editor's note: Alan Bailey owns Badger Productions in Anchorage, Alaska.
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