Wellbarrier at 100,000—the digital solution safeguarding an industry

From planning to execution, drilling to production operations to plug and abandonment, the life cycle solution provides one common digital location for well integrity management data.

Due to the depth and breadth of its offering, and with users competent after only three hours of training, Wellbarrier has become the gold standard for holistic well planning and management. The main benefits for project teams are:

1)     The creation of quick, consistent, and intuitive schematics that support understanding and improve communication.

2)     Objective risk analysis helps project teams to understand consequences and mitigate risks of barrier failures.

3)     Confidence in decision making through the improved data quality provided by digital integration

4)     Optimized well integrity performance and proactive operations planning in markedly less time than traditional solutions.

In the decade since the Wellbarrier solution hit the market, 100,000 well integrity schematics have been produced by 5,500 users across 67 nations. Engineers worldwide have been able to make sizeable time-savings, completing the tasks usually carried out in conventional spreadsheet-based apps, in just one third of the time.

From 2013 up till now, the Wellbarrier solution has saved more than a century’s worth of CO2 that would have been generated in office or onsite, and more than USD $20 million in engineers’ salaries paid.

Two companies that have made the Wellbarrier solution a mainstay of their operations are Norwegian international energy company, Equinor , and PETRONAS Caligari, a wholly-owned subsidiary of global Malaysian energy group, PETRONAS. We talk to SLB’s well management team about these major deployments, and the tangible benefits that both enterprises have seen as a result.

Husnu Ozgur Cengiz , Senior well integrity engineer

“Since our collaboration began in June 2022, more than 500 engineers have been trained on the Wellbarrier solution, and some 6,000 well barrier schematics were created in an 18-month period. This would have taken an estimated 15,000 hours using traditional methods—using the Wellbarrier solution, the Equinor team cut that down to only 5,000 hours. Working three-times quicker than usual saved the wells team USD $1 million in effort alone.

“Further feedback from the Equinor confirmed that the Wellbarrier solution enabled them to create well barrier schematics consistently, accurately, and efficiently, allowing project teams to focus on more meaningful engineering tasks, rather than struggling with the data and formatting inconsistencies associated with traditional ways of working.

Simon Copping , Well Integrity Domain Champion

“The Wellbarrier solution was a key component of the PETRONAS Carigali well integrity management system (WIMS), enabling the company to collect data in a structured approach to well integrity management, consistent with industry standards.

“Now that the Wellbarrier solution is a fully integrated part of their systems, PETRONAS Caligari engineers can rely on a repeatable, holistic methodology to prepare well barrier schematics, and analyze risks in collaboration with other stakeholders. Volumes of data that would have been impossible to manage previously are digested and analyzed in a streamlined way, meaning engineers spend less time searching for well information, and risk is managed far more effectively.

“With 450 registered users and counting, more than 7,000 schematics generated, and 1,900 wells securely managed, the Wellbarrier solution has provided PETRONAS Caligari with a real-time risk assessment tool that identifies precisely what can go wrong and all the possible consequences.”

For more info, please visit us as slb.com/wellbarrier or contact us directly at Tbakke@wellbarrier.slb.com