Case Study: Norwegian Operator Redefines Well Maturation Through Smarter Ways of Working

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Vår Energi's ambition is to accelerate well planning maturation while sustaining consistently top-quartile execution performance, from initiation through to a drill-ready well. Achieving that has demanded more than a new piece of software. It has required a shift in how subsurface, subsea, and project development, and drilling and wells business units work together.

Rather than maturing a well trajectory through a sequence of discipline-by-discipline handoffs, the three teams now plan inside a shared, real-time environment, jointly maturing the same trajectory from the first sketch through to a drill-ready design. The intent is to plan faster and use that speed to test more of the design space per well and capture more value.

One Environment, Multiple Domains

The scope of the new shared environment is wide. On the subsea and site side, it covers infrastructure constraints, bathymetry, and shallow-hazard mapping, including pock marks, anchor scours, boulders, and shallow gas, alongside surface-location placement. On the subsurface side, it covers reservoir well placement and risk factors, such as pore pressure, shear failure gradient, and fracture gradient, that shape a safe design. On the drilling side, it covers drilling-corridor definition and wellbore-geometry optimization.

Historically, each of those was effectively someone else's problem until a trajectory was far enough along to hand off. In the shared environment, all three are visible to everyone from the first sketch of a well (Fig. 1), which is what makes it possible to optimize reservoir exposure and design robustness together rather than resolving them one after another.

The new environment is also not a single piece of software running in one place. Some of the applications it connects run on premises while others run in the cloud. Making that combination feel like one workflow took a purpose-built, synced-drive IT integration layer to bridge the two. This is a deliberately fit-for-purpose piece of infrastructure, assembled around what the team already had, rather than a single platform bought off the shelf to replace it.

A Sequential Process Built for a Different Era

Well planning within the operator was typical of the industry and had been organized as a sequence of discrete steps: data preparation, drafting a trajectory, a pore-pressure/fracture-gradient plot and shallow-hazards check, picking formation tops, well engineering, and a design reassessment before the cycle could close. Data preparation alone typically took 25 to 30 days, drawing on inputs from all three domains in turn.

Each later step added 1 to 3 more days on its own, but if the reassessment surfaced a conflict, a target that didn't clear a wellbore-stability check, or a trajectory that fought with a subsea infrastructure or shallow-hazard constraint, the sequence looped back to drafting a new trajectory. That loop could add another 30 to 40 days, with the same six to eight people redoing analysis they had already done once (Fig. 2).