The Minister of Petroleum and Energy visits OpenLab

Published: Oct 23, 2020 by Jan Einar Gravdal

Photo: Representatives from the Ministry, with Tina Bru, The Minister of Petroleum and Energy

The Norwegian Minister of Energy and Petroleum visited NORCE and OpenLab today, and was impressed by the infrastructure in combination with Ullrigg at Ullandhaug.

-"We contribute, among other things, by digitizing and automating the oil and gas sector. This leads to safer and more efficient energy production, as well as increased recovery, which in turn contributes to the lowest possible carbon footprint", says Executive Vice President of NORCE Energi, Aina Margrethe Berg.

OpenLab is of great importance for research and commercial businesses that delivers new technologies for automated / autonomous drilling. New technology has proven to significantly reduce the CO2 footprint from the industry, and the potential is significant in the future. NORCE is now seeking funds to expand the OpenLab infrastructure to offer field data and to extend the simulation capabilities towards reservoir simulation and towards geothermal energy and CO2 storage.

OpenLab used in live demo of new drilling automation software

Published: Jun 30, 2020 by Jan Einar Gravdal

Photo: Stig Morten Thorsen and Morten Ørevik (NOV) in OpenLab Drilling

Large expectations were put on NORCE since a successful demonstration would pave the way for an installation at Johan Sverdrup in the North Sea. Together with our collaboration partners Sekal and National Oilwell Varco (NOV) new functionalities was demonstrated. In addition to the license partners at Johan Sverdrup; Equinor, Total, Lundin, AkerBP and Petoro, several energy companies and service companies followed the live streamed presentation with great interest and expectations.

“We are very happy to have so many representatives from the industry following our work on automated drilling”, says Rodica Mihai, manager of the technology development in the Demo2000 project Demonstration of Automated Drilling Process Control. The Drilling and Well Modeling group in NORCE is world leading in this field and been an active contributor to reduce costs and emissions from drilling operations.

During the live event, a new functionality in the DrillTronics system was demonstrated. DrillTronics is developed by NORCE and Sekal (acquired by Sumitomo in 2019). The new functionality optimizes the drilling rate automatically and is a key enabler of autonomous drilling operations. The reduced CO2 emissions enabled by drilling automation is a key factor to reach the goal of zero emissions from offshore installations. Benoit Daireaux, who is project manager at NORCE is very pleased with the demonstration.
“We are very proud to have reached this milestone. The collaboration with Equinor and Sekal in the development project and with NOV in the integration with NOVOS has been very efficient. The system works as intended and we look forward to see this in operational use.”

*Figure: The system developed by NORCE and Sekal automatically ensures the optimum drilling speed based on model predictions and operational constraints.*

NOV has delivered the drilling control system installed at Johan Sverdrup, and the integration of DrillTronics as an app to their system is now prioritized. Recently, the Research Council of Norway has awarded a Demo2000 project for integration of DrillTronics to NOVOS.
The demonstration was run in the simulator environment OpenLab Drilling and showed the capability of the infrastructure. OpenLab is the most realistic drilling simulator in the world for testing new software systems. The simulator has been used extensively over several months by NORCE, Sekal and NOV for this event. OpenLab Drilling is financed by the Research Council of Norway.

“This successful outcome today is a result of very good collaboration between NORCE, Sekal and NOV, and OpenLab as a test facility. Through this project we have seen how OpenLab enables a more efficient workflow and accelerates readiness of technology. The complexity of this system and the integration by three vendors would not be possible without OpenLab.”, says Jan Einar Gravdal, project manager in NORCE.

New OpenLab Video

Published: May 23, 2019 by Andrew Holsæter

OpenLab Grand Opening!

Published: Mar 22, 2019 by Andrew Holsæter

Last week, around 50 guests from the oil industry, IT companies, universities and research institutions participated in the grand opening of the advanced well drilling simulator, OpenLab, at NORCE in Stavanger.

Some images from the Grand Opening (photos curtosy of NORCE and Cecilie Hanevik)

Background

NORCE was awarded the assignment worth NOK 50 million by the Research Council in 2015. The OpenLab team comprises of the drilling & well modelling group in NORCE as well as IT consulting companies in Stavanger. Together, this small and dedicated team have collaborated closely with universities and the oil industry, to make OpenLab one of the world's most advanced simulators for training and technology development in digital drilling of oil and gas wells.

Easy access - increased knowledge, and better than the textbook

OpenLab was designed to be used for everyone and can just as easily be used by a lecturer in India, a student at the University of Calgary, or a drilling department in a company looking to test new methods, techniques and equipment.

With a full-scale drilling rig on site, and the University of Stavanger right up the street, drilling engineering and technology students can now come to NORCE to learn and get training in a realistic drilling environment. They can also use the simulation tool in their own drilling lab on campus.

To read more about OpenLab, visit our about About and Product pages, or try the simulator for free for yourself at https://live.openlab.app/!

And on behalf of NORCE and OpenLab, we would like to thank everyone who attended and especially Dan Sui and Mats Hermansen for presenting how they have being using OpenLab!

Some of the OpenLab team. From left: Robert, Thomas, Andrew, Kristian. Front: Nejm, Cecilie, Sonja, Otto. Not pictured: Jan Einar, Marcel, and Stian.

OpenLab Python Client

Published: Nov 23, 2018 by Andrew Holsæter

Introducing, the new OpenLab Python client! Programmatically interact with OpenLab Drilling data or create and control a new simulation with the free OpenLab Python API. You can download the package from our Downloads page here. Or if you have Python 3.4+, simply run the command “pip install openlab” from a command line to download the package. Once downloaded, follow the README instructions provided in the folder to get started. And read more about OpenLab here!

Creating a simulation is made easy

You can create a simple simulation or pass in more advance optional parameters like influx type or time step if a transient model is desired.

Running a simulation is even easier

Machine Learning

Utilize python’s rich library collections to interact with OpenLab as you want. Python shines with machine learning. In fact, the OpenLab Python client has already been utilized in the industry with machine learning (Ambrus and Saadallah 2018).

Jupyter/Teaching aid

Get to know both Jupyter notebooks and the OpenLab python client. The python package comes packaged with a Jupyter notebook section and several tutorials designed to be both a python teaching aid, as well as a guide on how to use the OpenLab python client.

Using these Jupyter notebooks, you can then share live simulation code snippets and run and share them with colleagues and classmates in a web browser.

Process Control

Drilling automation is all about process control. Use the provided PI Controller class or create your own controller to create complex simulations and explore control systems.

The sweep.py example that comes with the python client utilizes the PI controller to maintain bottom hole pressures at different flow rates by automatically adjusting the choke opening

With the OpenLab python client, it is easy to get and interact with results and simulations however you want. Below are just a few more examples of the possibilities:

Compare 2 simulations that were run in the browser to isolate differences
Run a simulation with outside influence (e.g. drilling data from another program)
Much, much more

Try now for free at live.openlab.app!

Dan Sui Associate Professor at UiS
5-year Master’s Programme in Petroleum Technology

Using such digital platform in teaching provides students more opportunities to develop new methods and algorithms, share and exchange knowledge and ideas. With the help of the simulator, students can easily simulate different dynamic drilling processes and get good fit-for-purpose training like petroleum engineers. We get very positive feedback from students in class”, Dan Sui concludes.

Mats Hermansen
SVP Sales, Exebenus

The NORCE OpenLab simulator gives Exebenus the ability to showcase the Exebenus Pulse value to a client by using their own historical data sets for any drilling or non-drilling scenarios.

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