Drilling innovations to simplify oil and gas exploration

When it comes to it, getting oil and gas out of the ground is pretty crude engineering. The industry has a reputation for slow innovation, which in a sector that is inherently conservative for reasons of safety is not entirely surprising. If you’re going to drill through rock to pump a liquid out of the ground (especially if that liquid is flammable and accompanied by an explosive gas) then tried-and-tested technology is probably the best way to go.

This, argues Shell’s head of wells R&D, Jan Brakel, leads to an interesting dichotomy. ‘We can fly aeroplanes with three hundred-plus people on board on full automatic over a distance of 5000 miles across the Atlantic ocean,’ he said, ‘but we cannot drill 5000 metres without continuous human intervention, using equipment that is still based on the basic design at inception.’

“We cannot drill 5000 metres without continuous human intervention, using equipment that is still based on the basic design