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Creating a Drilling Program

Drilling General (Program) Tab Settings

Is Active - Turns the drilling program on or off

Earliest start date - Program will not start prior to this date

Earliest Finish Date - Program will not finish prior to this date. The program will time its start, to finish at this date unless linkage to another task or resource constraint delays it.  

Start Trigger Function - Will start the drilling program when the function returns a non-zero value.

Can Run Function - Will continue the drilling program provided this flag is a non-zero value.

Drill Wells in Listed Order - Drills the wells in the exact order specified in the well list (will not optimize the schedule based on rig availability)

Calculation Order - Allows you to change the default calculation order for this program. See Calculation Order for Schedule Items for information on the calculation order for tasks.

Overriding Resource Type - Will use this resource type for all drilling activities.

Note: "Type" - Is the type of resource (rig, completion rig, frac crew etc)

Enable Local Resources - Resources are by default specified globally. In situations where you have rigs that can only be used by certain areas, then you can enable and use local resources.

Super Wells - This option will take all of the capital, production generated by the drilling schedule  and aggregate it to a single well. A "Super Well" can be used when you have thousands of wells, but don't necessarily require an individual evaluation for each well. By default the super well consolidates all of the wells in the program to a single well, unless super well grouping rules are used.  See

Creating a Super Well for more information.

Delay Production until task is finished - This allows you to specify a specific task that must be completed prior to the production coming on line. An example would be a tie-in, or completion of a plant.

Remove all wells from Calculations - Will remove all existing (manually) added wells from the calculation - deselect to make the wells active again.

Well Tasks

This tab allows you to specify individual or multiple wells to be drilled in the program. Adding a well, or clicking on an existing line item well will bring up the General well edit dialog. 

*You must have at least one well task in order to drill any wells 




Start Date - This is the earliest start date for this well Task

Template Name - This is the type well to use for this drilling task.

Number of Copies - maximum number of this well to drill. If you are using a well list, then this should be the number of wells in that list.

Drill in Groups of - By default the program will try to drill all of the wells available of this type, before going on to the next line in the program. This option will allow you to drill x number of this line of wells, before going to the next line. For example, you might drill 2 of type A wells, and 3 of type B, but have a total of 20 each. Grouping allows the order to be set to AABBBAA... to the total of each.

Flows to - Allows you to specify the facility that the well produces to.

On Production Group - Specifies that all wells in this group (say "Pad 1") will start producing at the same time (when the last well in that group is drilled).

Inherit land from - Specifies that the land record is assigned from the referenced asset.

Production Set - Specifies a specific production set to be used from the template well rather than the default.

Po, Ps - Allows you to specify the risk settings for the well.

Rate/Reserves Factor - This factor will scale the production in the type well by a constant. Note that the project must be calculated with risking for this factor to be applied. See 

• Batch drill top hole (1 rig)
• Drill main hole (2nd rig)
• Frac well (Frac Spread)
• Tie in well
• Each of these steps could use a different resource

Build Pad - Use this step to construct a pad. If this option is selected a non-active facility construction program to build the pad and a pad list must also be provided.

Required Resource Type - The type of resource required for this step (Top hole Rig, Drilling Rig, Completion Rig, Frac Spread etc).

Required Resource - If a specific named resource such as "Precision Rig #7" is selected, the program will only use this rig even if others are idle.  To avoid rig idle time “1^st Available” should be selected. 

Step Start Group - Creates a batch group for this task.  Eg "Pad 1", would batch this step with all "Pad 1" wells.  This feature would only generally be used with Well Lists.

Steps in group run simultaneously - Batch group runs all of wells in this step concurrently.  Eg A frac farm that can frac multiple wells at once.

Mobilization Durations - The times required for mobilization, the step itself (drill, frac, tie-in etc) and demobilization

Fixed Costs - Main capital costs for the task.

Step Duration - The time for the step (Drill, frac, tie-in etc) 

Drilling Depth - Only relevant for a drilling step.  This value can be used in where a resource cost per depth is specified to calculate costs based on depth or, in a user function to define drilling cost or time based on a function of depth. 

Booked As - Used to calculate the drilling time (Spud, TD) and rig utilization in the Drilling Report.

Capital Types - specify the capital category or categories for the costs.  *Note, only the costs specified in the steps will appear on the Gantt chart.  Type well costs will not appear. 

Costs - fixed capital costs for mobilization, the step itself and demobilization.  *Note 1:  the total cost of the step itself may also include a cost related to rig day rate or depth if either of these is defined in the Resources tab.  *Note 2:  the fixed costs only for the step itself can have an additional capital type associated with them (e.g. well site costs might be needed separately from development drilling costs without explicitly adding well sites as facilities).  All other step, mobilization and demobilization costs will be attributed to Capital Type 1 as implied by the alignment in the user interface.

Spread Manual Capital - Will find capital in the type well (manually entered via the Network or Data tab) which matches the capital types specified here, and spread it over the total task time instead of lumping into the start month (default). 

Stop facility production when step starts - Set if this step requires a pad shutdown (facility is the first connection to the well - generally a pad).  All wells on the pad will be shut in when this step starts for the first well on the pad.. 

Start facility production when step finishes - When there is a pad shutdown as above, this flag will start the pad production up again.  For example, if a pad was shut-in for a frac, it might start again at the completion of the next step (say clean-up for each of the wells). All wells would then come on again when they finished this clean up step.

Can Produce when finished - If this is the last step required for production, then it should be marked as "can produce". Note that generally only the last step should have this flag set. It can also be used for an interim step where production is shut in for the step, then started again in the next step.

Conditions (for well task steps)

Each step in the well task can have a dependency on another step.  For example, you may want a permit step to finish "just in time" with the drilling step.  The intrinsic condition on each step, is that it starts after the previous step.  eg Step 2 will start after step 1 is finished. 


Conditions for task step can include:

- Start After - The specified step must be finished before this task can start
- Start Start - This step can start when the specified step is started (which may have its own dependency)
- Finish Finish - This step finishes when the specified step finishes
- Finish Just in Time - this step will be started to finish in time for the next step to start (earliest possible start).

Conditions (for drilling tasks) - See Scheduler Conditions

See also