The week you are paying for
Too much of your team’s week is assembly work.
A drilling engineer’s value is judgement — what to change on this well, and when. Very little of the week is spent on it. The rest goes to three jobs that need a person only because nothing else will do them.
Finding the data
It is in six places, and none of them agree.
The rig system, the contractor’s PDF, a spreadsheet on somebody’s drive, the daily reports and the version the office keeps. Before anyone can think about the well or the day ahead, somebody reconciles all of it.
And tomorrow morning, somebody reconciles it again.
Rebuilding yesterday
The numbers already exist. Someone re-types them anyway.
Depths, ROP, connection times, the day’s charts, the comparison against plan. All of it is derivable, and all of it is rebuilt by hand, every morning, on every well you are running.
And on a day when nothing went wrong, somebody still spent the morning writing it up.
Reading the paperwork
Countless wells of reports and data, read one page at a time.
Before a well is planned, somebody investigates the offset wells to find out what went wrong and what went well. It takes days, so it gets done properly or it gets done quickly. Rarely both.
And when the engineer who drilled it is out of office, so is everything they learned.