At a recent grand opening in Stavanger, oil industry guests heard NORCE* researchers present OpenLab, an advanced drilling simulator. OpenLab is the fruit of a five year, 50 million NOK program funded by Norway’s Research Council. The simulator is said to be ‘one of the world’s most advanced simulators for training and technology development in digital drilling of oil and gas wells’. The simulator can be trialed live.
In an SPE-hosted webinar, speakers from Norway’s NORCE R&D establishment (formerly IRIS) showed how ‘seamless’ interoperability between real-time drilling systems can be achieved with a ‘semantical description’ of drilling signals. The approach leverages Norce researcher Eric Cayeux’s Drilling Data Hub which links multiple rig site data feeds with a ‘semantic data model*’. The model now forms the basis of the Norce OpenLab drilling simulator. Norce’s simulator can also be via a web API of as a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulator running in a control system (à la digital twin). Cayeux’s group believes that their semantical descriptions of drilling signals will ‘significantly reduce the time and resources needed to collect and process recorded data for post analysis and for research and innovation’. AkerBP, Equinor and Maersk (now Total) are users.
* Earlier presentations on DDHUB’s semantic data model stated that ‘the standard will be open and […] if successful, the semantical data model and its associated API will be passed to a standardization organism like Energistics’. This does not appear to have happened yet.
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