American Oil and Gas Reporter - November 2019 - 38

SpecialReport: Cybersteering
With increased horizontal drilling activity
in onshore resource plays, geosteering has
taken a variety of forms, including dedicated
geosteering centers with around-the-clock
operations, onsite geosteering, remote
geosteering and other operational models.
With the exception of onsite geosteering,
these models often require the geosteering
expert to oversee multiple wells of varying
status, complexity and difficulty at once.
In all cases, a method of automated geosteering would be helpful to confirm and validate
existing steers based on mathematical methods and also to potentially steer entire
wells autonomously.
Automated geosteering can increase
a geosteerer's output and accuracy, improving costs associated with the geosteering process, while simultaneously improving wellbore placement for improved
production. With gamma matching performed autonomously, geosteerers would
also have more time to utilize additional
information sources and experiment with
data such as seismic-while-drilling or az-

imuthal-wave resistivity to increase their
ability to proactively steer difficult wells.
Cybersteering requires nothing more
than standard well log data consisting of
well trajectory and gamma information,
along with a gamma TVD type log. It
utilizes a unique method of scoring strat
blocks and storing them in a graph database structure along with a distributed
"shortest-path" algorithm to determine
the sequence of strat blocks that provides
the best overall gamma match for the
entire wellbore. These calculations are
done in the cloud utilizing a computing
cluster to speed processing to the point
where cybersteering can be utilized on
both historical wells and currently drilling
wells.
Relational Graph Database
The key to cybersteering is the unique
adaptation of a graph database, which is
a relational NoSQL database consisting
of nodes and edges. Traditionally, nodes
store entities such as a person, place or

object, and the edges connect these entities
and describe their relationships. Common
applications include fraud detection in
finance and social media, product recommendation engines, identity and access
management, etc.
Cybersteering takes the concept of a
relational database and combines it with
spatial data by arranging nodes in a grid
system, with each node storing a specific
measured depth (MD) and relative stratigraphic depth (RSD) combination. Therefore, each node represents a potential position within the formation at each point
along the wellbore (on a prespecified interval), which is exactly the information
that geosteering attempts to determine.
The graph database should be tall
enough to encompass the entire target
zone, along with a buffer on either side
to remain within the target formation. It
should be wide enough to encompass the
entire length of the lateral. The intervals
between nodes are adjustable, but generally
speaking, a good starting point is a one-

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American Oil and Gas Reporter - November 2019

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