Drilling Performance Improvements of Salak Geothermal Field, Indonesia 2006 - 2008

Abstract

Chevron Geothermal of Indonesia launched the 2006-2008 Drilling Campaign to respond to maintain steam and injection capacity in the Gunung Salak Geothermal field. The drilling team has been successful in reducing the depth vs. days curves from an average of 55 days in 1993 to an average of less than 20 days in 2008. The best performance at the time of writing this paper is a 5350 ft well drilled in 9.6 days from spud to Total Depth. The evolution of this continued improvement process has resulted in “world class” drilling performance.
The critical success factors of this campaign include standardized well design, equipment improvements, and performance improvement processes that was made possible by a synchronized multi-disciplinary Well Decision Teams, Multi-disciplinary Decision Review Boards, Performance Monitoring, Ingenuity Projects (technology application), Interactive Communication (Integrated Pre-Spud Meetings and Daily Morning Meetings), Flat Spot Performance and Goal Setting (Perfect Well Targeting, and ultimately, the Single Digit Well Target). Additionally, we put a strong emphasis on improving our two way communication through the Stuck Pipe Prevention Workshops. The outcome of this successful approach has boosted productivity, reduced well costs and cycle time, and ultimately, improved the economics of the drilling campaign by over $4,000,000 per year (or one additional well per year).