Automated Well Placement not unlike Automated Mars Landings

Kinetic people

The recent Mars Perseverance Landing by NASA  overcame many of the same challenges, for similar reasons that directional drillers face when landing or Geosteering oil & gas wells

  • Mars landers are steered for hazard avoidance , Drillers steer to find payzones
  • Both have ellipse of uncertainty reasons for requiring Geosteering/Geohazard avoidance
  • Similar technology enablers are allowing large achievements of both Deep Space Landings and Wellbore placements
    • Improvements in Computing Power – speed- memory
    • Improvements in Sensor resolution and robustness
    • Improvements in automated algorithms
  • Slow real time data resolution (data comms rate) makes Automation Necessary, and limits timely human intervention
  • Both solutions rely on fast acquisition sensor data, gathered in a highly dynamic environment
  • Modern GPS technology is not available for solving either challenge
  • NASA used a process they call “Terrain Relative Navigation” to make the final decent to Mars with Perseverance, Geosteering is a similar process used to place horizontal wells.

Kinetic Upstream recently presented a product update at the first ever Oil & Gas Linkedin Livecast, RSS Event: , Push It, Point It, Rotate It, hosted by David Gibson.

Follow the link to see the FULL Kinetic Upstream Presentation at the event.

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