Drilling Process Safety
Michael Davis, B.S. Petroleum Engineering
• 25 years working mainly as a Drilling Engineer
• Main experience:
– HTHP drilling
– Deepwater drilling
• Subsequently trained in:
– Communication
– Team Building
– Team Work
– Team Psychology
– Cognitive Function and Dysfunction
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Drilling Process Safety
• Scholarship includes:
– SEMS and API 754
– 30 CFR 250
– O&G related API RPs
– Macondo studies
– Dr. Bea’s reports
– Professor Hopkin’s reports
– New Orleans trial reports
– CSB reports
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Drilling Process Safety
Progress
• We’re still in the “Discovery” phase
• Diligence will pay dividends
• Diligence requires:
– A little patience
– A lot of work
– Focus
– Funding
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Drilling Process Safety
Vision
• My Main Focus is my area of experience:
– Operational procedural compliance
• Formalizing Approvals
– Cover susceptibilities in Cognitive Function with AI
• Equipment
• Communications
– Checklists
– Algorithms
– Situational Awareness and the Broadcast Risk of
Operating, Assessed Dynamically (BROAD)
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Drilling Process Safety
Should progress how?
• Must:
– Involve Drilling engineers
– Instill “ownership”
• Feelings are key to “ownership”
• Levelheaded Formalities/actions create feelings
• Formalities and enforced actions cannot be capricious or “ownership” will be lost or fleeting
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Drilling Process Safety
• Focus on formalities and actions
• Formalities and actions centered on causes
• Causes clearly understood
• Agreement on causes shared
• Focus on and reward cause mitigations
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Drilling Process Safety
CSB recommendations
• The regulator should develop the following indicators for drilling operations and mandate their reporting:
• Number of kicks
• Response time to kicks
• Number of cementing failures
• Number of gas alarms
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Drilling Process Safety
CSB Recommendations Continued…
• Leading Indicators ?
– Sure; yet a leading indicator is reaction based
– Prevention based
…
• Broadcast Risk of Operating, Assessed Dynamically
(BROAD) This is a
focus and so leading indicators must be registering in a BROAD and broadcasted.
– Includes dynamic BROAD level mitigations 8

Drilling Process Safety
Its more than watching each other’s backs.
Its more than attention to details.
Its more than just communication.
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Drilling Process Safety
– With Personal Safety we can make assessments of risk on our own or by watching someone's back and paying attention to details and yet in dynamic environments, events are not determined by anyone yet by everyone.
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Drilling Process Safety
• BROADcast and The Adaptive Loop
– Instead of a linear planning, we make decisions using a feedback loop.
• The loop starts with determining what our situation is.
• As we take actions, we have to determine the effect of those actions before making our next move.
• The goal of each cycle is to improve our position, but we do not know the direction in which we will move until we see what the situation offers.
– In simple operations we can make this assessment on our own and yet in dynamic environments, events are not determined by anyone but by everyone.
» Hence the need for BROADcast
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Drilling Process Safety
• BROADcast
– Combines the perspectives of everyone into a insight
– assesses that insight into an assessment
– BROADcasts that assessment of collective insight back to everyone
– is the center of situational awareness in a dynamic environment and unique to drilling process safety as opposed to personal safety.
– We call this loop the Progress Cycle or, more simply, listen-aim-move-claim. After mastering strategy, it becomes an automatic way of thinking about situations.
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Drilling Process Safety
• BROADcasting supports better risk based decision making and mitigates past two major reforms’ shortcomings!
– Mandatory Well Control Training!
– Unintended Consequence?
• Replacement Company Men
– Mandatory Negative Pressure Testing!
– Unintended Consequence?
• Inducing kicks that cannot be killed
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Drilling Process Safety
CSB Recommendations Continued…
• Measure numbers of Kicks? Yes! Yet:
– More important is kick severity
– Current standards do not account for hole size, flowrates, mud density, in terms of size of kick designed for nor in time of detection
– More important is the dynamic assessment of kick tolerance and register
– Current Regulations are arbitrary to these factors
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Drilling Process Safety
CSB Recommendations Continued…
• Measure response time to Kicks?
– Sure yet why not measure formalities and actions that may reduce these times as well
– And why not address the human factors that may reduce these times and prevent kicks
– And why not focus on devices that may reduce these times and prevent kicks
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Drilling Process Safety
CSB Recommendations Continued…
• Measure # of cement failures? Not as important as:
– Designing Safe tests
• Negative Pressure Tests (NPTs) now mandated
– NPT Best Practices not prescribed nor universally understood
– Testing Safely & registering increased risk/hazard in BROAD
– Operations’ Procedural Compliance
» Formalized approvals & checklists
» Formalized monitoring & checklists
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Drilling Process Safety
CSB Recommendations Continued…
• Numbers of Gas Alarms?
– This recommendation came from this report from Macondo:
“We had gotten them so frequently that I had actually become somewhat immune to them. I’d get to the point where I didn’t even hear them anymore because we were getting gas back continuously. It was a constant fight. When the level reached
200, that’s the cut-off for all chipping, welding and grinding and other outside hot work. That’s when I start concerning myself with gas levels…”
– More important than numbers of gas alarms is big picture trend
– Trending in deepwater from oil drilling to gas drilling.
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Drilling Process Safety
Deepwater Drilling is Trending
• Traditional Deepwater work
– Teamwork (people/soft) skills
– Mainly drilling oil zones
• Oil is much less dangerous than gas in drilling
• Gas drilling requires a different skillset than oil drilling
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Drilling Process Safety
Deepwater Drilling is Trending, continued…
• Misnomer that DWD has been HTHP
• Deepwater Drilling Engineers need retooling
– HTHP engineers refined for teamwork skillsets
– Deepwater engineers refined for HTHP skillsets
– Both must be refocused on dynamic risk level and communication and behavioral discipline
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Drilling Process Safety
Deepwater Drilling is Trending, continued…
• Deeper Water Depths & Total Depth of well
• BOPE pressures => bubble pts & “Flashing” gas
• TDs thus more dry gas zones & GORs
• “Flashing” gas => Top of BOPE = gas in risers
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Drilling Process Safety
Deepwater Drilling is Trending, continued…
In HRO terms this means there is a
of
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Drilling Process Safety
• Q & A
• Thank you!
• Drilling Process Safety 101
• Drilling Process Safety Vision
• Key Issues in Deepwater
• Shell Process Safety Presentation to BSEE
• Drilling Process Safety - Communication
• Drilling Process Safety Vision of Progress
• Drilling Process Safety Risk Escalators
• PTTEP AA's "Line of Sight" System is Similar to BROAD
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