Estimating Drilling Cost and Duration Using Copulas Dependencies Models

• Main Authors: M. Al Kindi, M. Al-Lawati, N. Al-Azri
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sultan Qaboos University 2017-03-01
• Series: The Journal of Engineering Research
• Subjects: archimedean copula, monte carlo simulation, mechanical risk index (mri).
• Online Access: https://journals.squ.edu.om/index.php/tjer/article/view/182

Estimation of drilling budget and duration is a high-level challenge for oil and gas industry. This is due to the many uncertain activities in the drilling procedure such as material prices, overhead cost, inflation, oil prices, well type, and depth of drilling. Therefore, it is essential to consider all these uncertain variables and the nature of relationships between them. This eventually leads into the minimization of the level of uncertainty and yet makes a "good" estimation points for budget and duration given the well type. In this paper, the copula probability theory is used in order to model the dependencies between cost/duration and MRI (mechanical risk index). The MRI is a mathematical computation, which relates various drilling factors such as: water depth, measured depth, true vertical depth in addition to mud weight and horizontal displacement. In general, the value of MRI is utilized as an input for the drilling cost and duration estimations. Therefore, modeling the uncertain dependencies between MRI and both cost and duration using copulas is important. The cost and duration estimates for each well were extracted from the copula dependency model where research study simulate over 10,000 scenarios. These new estimates were later compared to the actual data in order to validate the performance of the procedure. Most of the wells show moderate - weak relationship of MRI dependence, which means that the variation in these wells can be related to MRI but to the extent that it is not the primary source.