AN ABERDEEN-BASED partnership has launched a new global index developed to quantify the difficulty of drilling wells. Its successful action should lead to large savings on well costs.
The Rushmore Drilling Index (RDI) has been created by Rushmore Associates in joint venture with Sigma Consultancy (Scotland) via Rushmore Reviews. It aims to enable operators to “normalise” their drilling performance across different types of wells, rigs, drilling groups, areas or countries. It also allows wells of similar difficulty to be grouped for comparison purposes.
A further device, launched at the same time as the RDI, is the Rushmore Estimated Drilling Days (RED days) tool, which predicts the time that would be taken by the average operator to drill a well in any of more than 50 countries.
It was developed in conjunction with the index utilising similar statistical techniques. According to Rushmore, this allows operators to establish drilling times for initial planning purposes within minutes rather than days.
Helen Rushmore, of Rushmore Reviews, said: “We were tasked by a number of operators some time ago to develop this index.
“They insisted that we only use objective data from our database, which contains data on over 30,000 wells drilled by 170 operators in 70 countries over the last two decades.
“The most important feature for the operators was that there be no subjective or guess-timated elements. There had to be a rigorous statistical approach.
“To ensure this, we engaged a professor of statistics at the University of Aberdeen as our independent expert.”
Among early users of the index is Chevron and Rushmore has already engineers at the super-major gorize wells of similar technical complexity and then predict drilling performance using real well data from the Rushmore database rather than utilising predetermined risk indices that may or may not be applicable for a particular drilling area.
The Rushmore Reviews benchmarking studies were originally developed by a group of 10 UK operators led by BP in 1989 and outsourced to Rushmore and Sigma in 1993. The studies have now grown to have global reach and to also include completions and well-abandonment data.