Taking the pain out of well pad design

Designing wells in 3D results in faster turn-around, more geoscience input, and opens the door to more detailed analytics.

From Well Sticks to Interactive 3D Planning

Drawing well sticks on a map can be a quick way to plan future field development – but this approach can get challenging as those plans get closer to reality. Moving from well sticks to a 3D design can be a very iterative and time-consuming process, that often starts with 2D designs and multiple software packages.

Ed Chow, SeisWare Co-Founder and VP Business Development explains,

“The status quo is a problem because it is currently a laborious, stop/start process that is primarily between the planners and engineers to locate the wells with limited geoscience input. Integrating geoscience into this process will provide significant business benefits in terms of both costs and revenue.”

Modernizing the Planning Process

This realization motivated the SeisWare team to explore ways to modernize the planning process and integrate more geoscience information.

Firstly, the team developed an application that lets users design wells in 3D from the start of the process rather than converting plans to 3D at the end. In doing this, the well planner avoids having to go through multiple iterations and software packages.

We also recognize that plans change. We accommodate this by allowing the designer to test and update multiple scenarios and designs. Users can change well length and orientation and add child wells in multiple intervals.

Being a geoscience company, we wanted to incorporate more geoscience information. As companies rely more and more on data analytics, we wanted to enable our users to combine well plans and geoscience information. In doing this, we set up the user to perform detailed analytics on the well path – a process which can also be applied to drilled well paths for a detailed look-back using well performance information

We also understand that teams are integrated and need to work together. We made designs sharable and created a stand-alone viewer to allow designers to share their plans with their engineering colleagues.

What the Future Holds

SeisWare hopes that by simplifying well design and enabling data analytics, we can make field development as painless as possible.

“What we hope to accomplish is to make field development a much more interactive process that is the launching point for the data analysis that geoscience can provide to optimize the drilling, completions, and production from wells”, says Ed.

Learn more about Field Development by SeisWare here or check out our YouTube videos on Well Planning and Analyzing Well Performance

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