ABERDEEN DRILLING SCHOOL: Trusted Scenario-Based Training from O&G Innovators 

“The things we teach, and the things our clients are doing off- and on-shore is some of the most dangerous work in the world,” admits Jason Grant, Managing Director at Aberdeen Drilling School.

According to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the oil and gas industry has a fatality rate of seven times that of the total of all other industries. Explosions, fires, falls, accidents with equipment or hazardous material, or problems in confined spaces are the leading sources of injury or worse. And most of the time, these issues are avoidable. Too often, lacking expertise and experience is the underlying indirect cause of troubles.

“There is a huge amount of pressure only a couple of valves away at any one time,” highlights Grant.

To ensure safety and drive new skills through the industry, especially when it comes to complex drilling and high-pressure high-temperature (HPHT) environments, developing a competent workforce and continually educating in a quickly changing sector is vital.

Aberdeen Drilling School was established in 1982 with the sole aim of keeping offshore drilling professionals safe. For the past four decades, the company has adapted and transformed to become a global leader in the training, teaching, and coaching of drilling professionals, instilling safety as the number one concern in the minds of all.

From its home in Europe’s oil capital through Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, Malaysia and the far east all the way to Mexico, Aberdeen Drilling School is building competence in the industry, through the use of real-world experience and industry leading technology.

“Our founder, Gene Wilson started teaching basic drilling practice and well control from our small Aberdeen office back in the 80s, then we started to get involved in supporting the regulation of the industry through the International Association of Drilling Contractors (IADC) and later the International Well Control Forum (IWCF). These two industry bodies are set up to protect and ensure competence in the offshore workforce by implementing regulation and certification based on industry best practice”, says Grant.

From there, our instructors became more involved in supporting complex well developments, working with clients in the North Sea that were entering new frontiers drilling HPHT and deepwater wells, developing a reputation for advanced drilling training and consultancy support.

Importantly, the company’s offering has proven its worth.

“We have worked with a number of clients from Oman to Malaysia to study the impact of our training, showing how our direct intervention in workforce competence has directly affected the safety, efficiency and the cost of drilling campaigns. The results of these studies have shown that non-productive time is significantly reduced, and operations are run much more efficiently. To the client the savings make the cost of the training pale into insignificance,” Grant declares.

WORLD-CLASS SIMULATORS

At the heart of Aberdeen Drilling School’s offering is the extensive field experience of their instructors who have worked in complex drilling operations all over the world.  They are supported by cutting edge simulator technology, developed inhouse within their sister company RelyOn Nutec Simulation.

“Having used commercially available drilling simulators for decades with limited success, we concluded that bringing the end users together with the technology developers would create the simulators that we always needed, operationally relevant mimicking real life operations”.  User friendly, functional, efficient, and constantly updated, the simulators run by Aberdeen Drilling School provide learners with a hyper realistic setting, allowing them to experience and learn about their work in detail, without the risk of disaster, always focussing on safety.

“It’s about role-specific competence in the drilling industry and that is our complete focus,” states Grant. “If you look at the workforce development work we undertake in the Middle East, that is all about establishing competency in the roles, from greenhands through to senior management. We ensure everyone works to the correct safe environment and feels empowered through knowledge, to recognise and stop dangerous situations from developing – safety should run through every part of the role, and that goes right up to our most advanced offerings.  When we’re working with clients on our simulators in Aberdeen or in our other centres around the world, it’s about looking at how we create the immersive environment, with operational familiarity, where dangerous operations are run safely.

“How we understand and control pressures and how we manage potentially catastrophic incidents in our industry involves having a highly competent and knowledgeable workforce, with individuals that can recognise danger and stop operations at any time. That is how we look at all of the work we do – it is all about having a competent well trained individual who has a safety mindset and is confident enough to stop operations if he believes something dangerous is happening,” he adds.

Currently, the company can upskill clients with courses across HPHT, deepwater drilling operations, well intervention and pressure control, well engineering, well integrity and more.

ADS3-Drill and ADS4-Drill simulators are full-size and provide a dynamic drilling simulation experience. ADS1-Drill and ADS2-Drill are smaller and portable, and allow for onsite crew training experiences. When combined with knowledge from Aberdeen Drilling School instructors, clients have the most thorough training available. By delivering a crucial competent workforce, the company also provides long-term costs savings and productivity enhancements.

“Our core skill is utilising the most experienced instructors that we can find. All of our instructors have offshore experience, and they have all worked in very complex drilling situations, all experiencing some of the issues that can happen. We use their expertise to design, develop and deliver courses and consult on operations,” says Grant, an industrial microbiologist by training, who has helped shape companies for global growth alongside the Scottish government, including establishing Aberdeen Drilling School in Malaysia in 2013 (now the largest well control school in Asia).

“We acquired a small simulation company around four years ago, and we have been working to ensure that we as a combined team develop the simulators to mimic operations as realistically as possible, both downhole and topside. Again, we call on the experience of our instructors to guide the teams that develop the simulators. That is our USP in this market. We are an experience-based training provider that uses simulation as a tool rather than the other way around.”

With experienced coaches in our cyber-based simulator suite, even those new to the industry are able to quickly get up to speed and learn operational methods, underpinned by safety.

“They can drill, trip and run tools under extreme pressure, and they can push as hard as they want, as the simulated environment is unbreakable.

 “For more advanced projects, we mimic the equipment being used on their own operations and can include third party equipment such as MPD or automated drilling packages. If we have well data from a client, we can program that into the system and the client will experience almost exactly the environment they would be drilling in the real world.

“There are two areas for the simulator,” Grants adds. “The topside for the equipment, tools and the custom view from where the driller would operate, and the downhole – the part that nobody sees. That is where we have very complex hydraulic models that look at the pressures that are exerted at any one time, in any part of the well. Be that gas expansion, fluid, mud rates, well direction – they all have different challenges and we can build all of that into the downhole environment.”

This experience and knowledge is essential as it is now widely accepted that the easier oil and gas wells – especially in the North Sea – are all but gone. Closer interaction between government, private sector, and trade bodies was previously thought to be the key to improving UKCS economics, but in 2022 with public appetite for new exploration and the energy transition changing, it is clear that improving costs will come down to personnel competence and increasing use of technology. 

 “The amount of easy wells to be drilled, particularly in this part of the world, is not the same,” Grant acknowledges. “Just about every project we’ve had in the past 12 months has been HPHT focused, and in pretty deep water, very narrow margin drilling.

 “There is a real shortage of experienced staff in our industry, we are about to see this coming to a head in the North Sea.  We are already witnessing the shortage in places like Saudi Arabia where there are large numbers of new rigs entering the market, all looking for the same competent individuals. We have clients contacting us right now saying they are scared that their competent personnel are going to be poached by new entrants in the market. They want to incentivise, train, and progress staff so that they can retain and grow them.

 “Many are looking at greenhand training and want to understand how to get new staff into the industry and build ground-up competence. In the Middle East, many of the new entrants to the industry come from Asia, and there is a need to make sure the personnel that arrive to undertake a critical role are competent to do so, so that they can hit the ground running. That is what we see in the Middle East and I think that will happen here in Europe over the next six to twelve months. There are a lot of next generation rigs moving into the North Sea so it is a new and exciting time for the industry, but very challenging for drilling contractors, trying to man those positions.”

 TAILORED TECHNOLOGY

 Utilising tech as much as possible not only drives efficiency and cost, it is also a real aid in the industry’s safety drive – anything that can take people away from the drill floor or the red zone. In the longer-term, Aberdeen Drilling School hopes to be able to bring a new approach to drilling, using simulators to help automate the drilling industry. World-class software development and simulator technology is required for such lofty ambitions.

 “If we look at our simulator technology, we acquired the most advanced drilling simulation in the market. This has allowed us to move into complex consultancy, but it also has its challenges as this particular technology wasn’t really built to train large teams, and allow them to interact, and that is what the industry wants. We have done a lot of development to make our systems a bit more suited for interactive training and large groups,” states Global Portfolio Manager, Lauren Horgan.

 In the near future, exchanging real-time information between the offshore rig and the onshore simulator will result in the ability to predict problems before they arise, creating a pathway for safe drilling, using the company’s simulators to verify.

 “We are in discussion with a number of operators in the North Sea where they would give us real time data from their operations and would use that to drill 24-48 hours ahead of them, reporting back on difficult obstacles that we think may come up, feeding back directly to the drill crew.

“If you extrapolate that as far as it can go, we can eventually look at how you can drill an unmanned operation offshore, from a room somewhere onshore. That is where the industry is going to go in the next two decades, but it does require a real time data swap,” says Grant.

Right now, RelyOn Nutec Simulation is trialling this concept with port operations – an industry sector that it sees as perfect for expansion.

“We have a number of simulators based in ports around the world, looking at how a port operator can streamline their business,” he says, adding that the whole idea is about the speed of moving cargo and if you can streamline logistics and train people to be more efficient then you can save many man hours and a great deal of money.

“Through those projects, we have got more into remote operations – how a simulator in a central office tied into an operating system can manipulate and manage multiple cranes around a port operation in real time.  We have two projects running successfully at the moment where we have recreated an exact port operation, and use a simulator in an office, to move multiple cranes and cargo within the port.  Remote operation systems is an area we really want to develop and build on. It is something that will happen in time within the drilling industry, as it becomes more automated, and we in Aberdeen Drilling School can look at how we support these operations remotely, from a simulator.”

For now, the company is busy building further training capacity so that industry competence is unquestionable, and safety is paramount. The Covid-19 pandemic moved the company, like many others, online temporarily. But Aberdeen Drilling School was comfortable, broadening its scope alongside the industry in a challenging time while retaining market share.

“Our strategy is to support global clients as they undertake a journey to upskill in everything they do,” says Horgan.

“There’s always competition and most of our clients have moved into the digital space, becoming increasingly comfortable with e-learning and virtual instructor-led training, particularly in the last three years. As part of the RelyOn Nutec group we have been lucky to have inhouse digital software development teams, and they have great development of e-learning capability. We are working with them to continuously develop and expand our capabilities. We launched our first collaborative project two years ago with the online IADC WellSharp Introduction to Well Control course. It’s currently our third largest selling e-learning course anywhere in the world It’s a very interesting area, but we still see the expertise of our instructors as our USP and getting learners in front of our instructors, on fantastic tools like the drilling simulator that we have developed, is the future of our business with e-learning as a supplement,” she adds.

The digital footprint of the organisation is strong. In the past six months, the company has expanded its online operation and is now able to further support clients around the globe, with drill or well intervention crews able to log into the Aberdeen Drilling School online learning management system and complete competency programmes so that the company can establish a bespoke competency assessment based on existing criteria.

“We can work with global organisations to assess whether all of their teams are at the right competence level, and if they are not then we can fill those gaps with our role-specific training. Off the back of this, we have been developing cloud-based simulation to allow clients to fill competency gaps with online assessment and training on a drilling or crane simulator,” Horgan details.

NO INCIDENT

Asked about the actual in-situ results of the training provided by Aberdeen Drilling School, Grant highlights a recent feedback session with an important client. Every problem the instructors imagined came up in the live environment. Thankfully, every solution instilled in the team was used to carefully navigate through a very difficult operation.

“Last year, we ran a number of DWOS courses for a pre-spud operation, looking at drilling a complex, high pressure well in the North Sea,” details Grant. “The client asked us to develop and run a number of scenarios based on what we thought could possibly go wrong when drilling in the high-pressure window. We used our instructor experience and we came up with possible critical situations and issues that could happen based on their own well information. We ran these scenarios with all four crews  to train them to expect the unexpected.

“We had feedback from the client that three of the four scenarios that we took them through actually did start to happen when drilling the well. Thankfully, the team were well trained to recognise the trends, and knew what to do to deal with the situations as they occurred.  In the end there was no incident through the entire drilling campaign and that is exactly what we want to hear,” smiles Grant, adding that the company continually develops new scenarios based on what their instructors think that could happen in complex operations, and practice them inhouse. “We don’t want our clients to come to us and ask us for something they require urgently and we don’t have it.”

DRILLING FOCUS?

Many of the world’s oil majors and related operating companies are either buying renewables companies or moving into the renewables space. There is momentum in the transition and fossil fuels will, eventually, be left behind. But where Aberdeen Drilling School operates – offices in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Houston, Malaysia, Doha, Norway etc – drilling will continue, and competence is required around the delivery of wells.

“We are a niche organisation but we don’t focus only on drilling. We look at the lifecycle of the well itself,” confirms Grant. “That lends itself to renewables where we are teaching how to drill safely and manage competently. That can be a water well in Africa or a geothermal well in the USA – we have projects underway right now in these areas. Everything in the drilling lifecycle including what comes before drilling, the drilling campaign, maintenance of a well, and assurance of integrity in a well through its life, and abandonment, is all within our scope.”

For expansion, Grant is keen on two geographic areas. Firstly, the US land where there are issues with well abandonment, and secondly Australia where there are multiple deep-water applications in which the company could drive competence.   

“How to abandon wells safely and securely is what we are busy with now and we work alongside the UK regulatory bodies to ensure training is developed to the highest standards, and that is something that we hope to take international. We know in the USA, there is problem around well integrity post-abandonment, and we see the work that we have initiated here with UK regulators as something which we can take to the immense US market.”

Poorly sealed wells have been an ongoing issue for US regulators, with some commentators suggesting that there could be millions of abandoned wells leaking harmful and hazardous materials, all over the country. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommended in 2019 that U.N. member countries should track and display the amount of methane leaking from abandoned oil and gas wells. In the US, more than 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells emitted 281 kilotons of methane in 2018.

“We hope to get underway with that in the next six months and work with US regulators and inspectors,” Grant says.

New projects in Australia are expected to support many jobs and businesses that are reliant on stable gas supplies. “I think that Australia in particular is a very exciting market at the moment. There are some really interesting complex deep-water operations that we would love to get involved with,” says Grant. “It is the interesting stuff that really excites us. Some of the operations in Australian waters, particularly in HPHT zones, are operations that we would love to work in. We have never managed to build a presence in Australia, despite completing over a dozen projects there with operators over the last 10 years.

“Other countries like Mexico, where we have started to establish a presence, are booming and we have just a full-size drilling simulator there to support our clients. Brazil has so many rigs moving to start operations at the moment, and that will highlight that lack of capacity in the workforce, which will in turn start the recruitment boom for competent personnel. Brazil and Mexico are the two exciting areas that we are in that will require a step up in our operations to cope with the demand. That also goes for Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi too, where the number of rigs going in is mind blowing.”

Combine decades of experience and premier technology, and the result is something that few can deliver: Trust. With so much requirement for competence on the horizon, and a shifting industry desperate for certainty around safety, Aberdeen Drilling School holds a fundamental position in the market.

Simulate, optimise, perfect is RelyOn Nutec Simulation’s motto, and Aberdeen Drilling School is doing just that, ensuring safety is drilled deep into the workforce of today and tomorrow.

Content sponsored by Aberdeen Drilling School.