American Oil and Gas Reporter - July 2021 - 49

SpecialReport: Devon Energy
Back in 2002, Trey Lowe was a young
completions engineer getting his start
right as the shale revolution was starting
to roll. He joined Devon in 2006 at about
the time it completed a $2.2 billion acquisition
to expand its Barnett operation.
It was going all-in on shale.
Maintaining An Edge
Today, Lowe serves as vice president
of technology. He has a guiding hand in
maintaining the technical proficiencies
that for so long have given Devon a sharp
competitive edge, and views technology
from a business-end perspective. " For
us, innovation is the means to achieve
our business objectives, which include
targeted financial and operational metrics,
but also environmental, social and governance
goals, " Lowe states.
Much as John and Larry Nichols
scarcely could have recognized when
they founded the company in 1971 what
Devon ultimately would become, Lowe
concedes that it is next to impossible to
envision what the company's operations
may look like in another 50 years. But
whatever tomorrow has in store-be it in
five quarters or five decades-he says the
concerted investment the company has
made to implement a data-centric digital
platform spanning its entire business will
be helping foster technical breakthroughs
across its entire portfolio of assets.
" I am excited about how the digital
platform creates long-term opportunities
for our field operators, engineers and
geoscientists to innovate. They are going
to come up with new inventions and ideas
for operating and designing wells in ways
we cannot fathom today, " he remarks. " I
know it is coming. I have seen innovations
start to happen over the past couple years
and they are coming at a faster and faster
pace all the time. Our future will be
driven by our employees' discoveries. "
According to Lowe, the next-generation
capabilities spinning out of its
enterprise-scale digital backbone are
likely to evolve around the three core
operational domains that have fueled
technological advances in resource plays
since the days of the Blakely Estate
D2: well construction, completion and
production. Going forward, he says digital
solutions encompassing cloud computing,
the Internet of Things, machine
learning, artificial intelligence and automation
not only will reshape how
TREY LOWE
Devon builds and operates wells, but
can lead the company into new frontiers
as global energy markets gradually transition
toward renewables.
Streaming Real-Time Data
Devon was an early adopter of live
data analysis in its drilling and completions
operations. In fact, Lowe says, it started
streaming real-time, high-frequency data
from drilling rigs and frac spreads in 2012.
" That has laid the foundation for where
we are today in well construction, " he
states. " The breakthrough today is that
we are able to join a lot of the sensor
data that comes from the well site with
subsurface characterization information.
That enables us to continually improve
at a much faster and more effective pace. "
The results have been transformative
during the past five years, propelling
Devon to the top of its peer group for
well performance and operational execution
metrics. " We went from being an underperforming
operator in the lower half of
our peer group all the way up to the very
top, " he reports. " A lot of that was the
result of hard work by our engineering
staff, but it was also because of the foundation
that we laid with our digital platform
to collect high-quality data and make it
readily accessible in real time. "
In its early iteration, the platform
streamed data to a real-time operations
center in Devon's Oklahoma City headquarters.
" We have matured beyond that
now, to where algorithms perform much
of the role of the real-time operations
center, " he comments. " We still use an
operations center for geosteering operations
but drilling and completion engineering
are largely automated. "
Algorithms continually analyze realtime
data feeds, providing usable information
around the clock to help field personnel
make sense of what they are seeing and
empower them to take decisive action. " I
do not think we could have gotten to this
point without going through the step of
having a real-time operations center. We
learned a lot from that, " Lowe remarks. " It
is almost like going back to a distributed
model. All the data flows into a centralized
place, but analysis is decentralized so that
engineers and field personnel can make
decisions very quickly. "
Lowe emphasizes that Devon is not
focused on acquiring novel or unique
types of data, but instead on extracting
novel and unique insights by integrating
all available information in a powerful
new way. " We do not have a new prototype
sensor, " he assures. " The magic we are
experiencing comes from aggregating
disparate datasets, such as joining live
streamed drilling data with subsurface
and geologic data to make well spacing
decisions. In the past, that would have
been really hard to do. "
Moving The Needle
Through better and more timely data
analysis, Devon has been able to move
the needle on casing design and sizing,
in-zone drilling times, lateral length optimization,
etc. Going forward, digital
technology increasingly is making it possible
to automatically control the mechanical
drilling processes themselves
using machine learning protocols, according
to Lowe.
" There is an opportunity in the near
future to do more calculations and control
at the edge of the rig site with a computer.
Whether managing hook loads, sliding
at the right time or rotating at the optimal
speed, we will ultimately teach a computer
to automatically maintain the correct setpoints, "
he reveals. " We are starting to
experiment with a trial project using some
of those machine learning models and
edge computing technologies. "
In its simplest terms, the technology
allows Devon to operationalize on all its
rigs in all its operating areas the parameters
and practices applied on its top-performing
JULY 2021 49

American Oil and Gas Reporter - July 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Oil and Gas Reporter - July 2021

Contents
American Oil and Gas Reporter - July 2021 - Intro
American Oil and Gas Reporter - July 2021 - Cover1
American Oil and Gas Reporter - July 2021 - Cover2
American Oil and Gas Reporter - July 2021 - Contents
American Oil and Gas Reporter - July 2021 - 4
American Oil and Gas Reporter - July 2021 - 5
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American Oil and Gas Reporter - July 2021 - Cover3
American Oil and Gas Reporter - July 2021 - Cover4
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