Market Intelligence: Datapoints And Drilling Rigs

A drilling industry notion in the pre-rig class delineation days more than a decade ago postulated, “A rig is a rig is a rig.”

Adoption of alternating current variable frequency drive (AC-VFD) drilling technology ended the nostrum of the rig as a commodity service. Yet, the advent of Big Data analytics promises to revive that timeworn cliché in an unexpectedly positive way.

The Big Data movement in oil and gas is loosely bifurcated between production optimization, where benefits accrue to E&P companies from data mining archived well data, and the drilling process, which offers real-time data acquisition via the rig’s instrumentation package.

Those silos promise to converge into a holistic approach that integrates drilling, completion engineering and production optimization into a unified package that delivers better wells with lower lifetime costs.