SPE November Lecture: The Role of Modern Real-Time Operation Centres (RTOC) in Increasing Drilling and Completion Operations Efficiency

The oil and gas industry has traditionally been the most dynamic industry in the world. Increasing demand on natural resources was driven by the natural increase of the world’s population, and emerging economies leading to big investments in developing new highly advanced technologies in the fields of exploration, drilling and production. With increasing complexity, there is an increasing criticality, risk and cost. Real-Time Operations Centres can help improve the process of making well-informed decisions, risk analysis, safeguard the operations, and increase operations efficiency through better operational planning and execution

The three critical attributes for an RTOC to be effective are; receiving data from offshore sites in real-time mode, the constant communication between offshore sites and the onshore RTOC, and RTOC crew competence as the RTOC must have experienced and highly trained personnel. This presentation discusses the effective RTOC’s objectives, functions, added value, processes, communications, and RTOC Human factors. Cost – benefit and examples of performance improvement examples are briefly discussed too. The presentation is based on a qualitative case study that examined 7 Real-Time Operations Centres for 7 different operators, and literature review.

Speaker: Taisir Shanableh, Independent Consultant

Taisir has more than 30 years of international technical and managerial experiences in Australasian, European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Asian offshore and onshore operations. Worked with Sperry Drilling from 1991. Besides his regular position he has been a software/hardware instructor for SDL until the merger with Halliburton in 1998. From 2005 to 2015 he worked as a Halliburton Real-Time Operations Centre senior drilling optimisation engineer and RTOC advisor/instructor/coordinator in Asia Pacific, USA, Middle East and Europe for Shell, Petronas, Petrofac, Lukoil, Gas De France (ENGIE), and Reliance Industries. He has started and managed 4 RTOC globally from inception to implementation. In the last 2 years Tarsier has been an independent consultant while completing his second MSc degrees . Taisir holds an MSc in Engineering Management from Curtin University, MSc in Petroleum Exploration from Aberdeen University, and a BSC in Applied Geology from Damascus University.