Drilling Risk Identification, Filtering, Ranking and Management

Article History: Received: 10 Sep. 2016 Accepted: 9 Mar. 2017 Drilling Operations are exposed to a variety of hazards, some of which may be location and activity dependent and each could pose different risk from different paths. Drilling operation may be vulnerable to hurricanes in one region and be exposed to Geohazards in another. However, there are other hazards, (e.g. corrosion, age degradation, poor maintenance), which equally affects every rig. Identifying what can go wrong and their likelihood and possible consequences provides insight into vulnerability of the operation and helps to generate mitigation options. Filtering and Ranking risk contributors enable to decide priorities and to focus on the most important risk contributors. This paper offers a framework to identify, assess, prioritize, and manage drilling risks, which includes: (1) a holistic approach to risk identification; (2) prioritization of a large number of risk influencing factors or risk scenarios; (3) structured elicitation of experts’ opinion and effective integration of experts judgment into qualitative and quantitative analyses to supplement limited data availability; (4) extreme and catastrophic event analysis; and (5) use of multi-objective framework to evaluate risk management priorities.