Building up a picture of the subsurface is a massive undertaking, one which takes thousands of hours and a diverse team. Everyone from drilling engineers, geologists and petrophysicists are involved. Unfortunately, on many projects, insights from planning in the office are not transferred to the well site. It is a long-standing issue and without closing the loop, there is a risk that wells will run over time and budget.
Even in a mature development field where tens of wells have been drilled and completed, the subsurface continues to surprise. You need to bring online as many tools as possible to improve the odds of success. One of the most powerful is offset well correlation.
Many will remember a time when correlation involved unfurling scrolls of well logs from dot-matrix printers and geoscientists commandeering the boardroom table. Technology has come a long way. Well log software packages have been around for a couple of decades. However, much of the work is still done with static data, leaving aside real-time information.
At many wellsites, correlation simply does not happen. Isolated from the corporate database and powerful software packages, many wellsite geologists are left in the dark. Often the only tangible document for the wellsite geologist to work from is a pre-spud report and if lucky, a rough map of the previous well locations.
