Diamond Offshore Drilling has announced its Blockchain Drilling (BD) service. This appears to be a first in the application of blockchain technology in the offshore drilling industry. The objective of the BD service is to drive efficiencies and enable oil and gas operators to reduce their total cost of ownership.
“The Blockchain Drilling platform provides our customers with an economical, scalable foundation for building blockchain applications to optimize their projects while reducing TCO,” said Marc Edwards, President and CEO of Diamond Offshore. “With the implementation of this service, together with recently released innovations, Diamond is further demonstrating our thought leadership in the offshore drilling market.”
The Blockchain Drilling service
The Blockchain Drilling service provides an immutable platform for the optimization of well construction activities, including drilling related services, material and the supply chain, both shore-based and offshore. Users can access and analyze performance from any web accessible device for near real-time TCO management.
The cloud-based BD platform is scalable. Its baseline system consists of five modules which deploy for efficiency and elimination of waste:
- Supply Chain & Logistics Manager: this provides transparency, provenance and immutability across the entire supply chain
- Well Planner: this displays actual versus planned time-to-depth data with detailed events
- Spend Monitor: aggregates total well construction costs versus budget
- Dynamic Critical Path: shows real-time bottlenecks as they develop
- Performance Tracker: this monitors operational key performance indicators (KPIs).
These configurable modules adapt for the BD platform for individual wells or multiple wells, depending on each customer’s needs.
The importance of supply chain
Diamond Offshore Drilling expects customers to use the BD platform from procurement through the construction, completion and production phases. Tracking, planning, and optimising well(s) through each phase is what provides the ability to:
- reduce expenditure
- eliminate waste
- improve processes
- align all the parties needed to deliver a well.
Developed in partnership with Data Gumbo Corporation, Diamond Offshore Drilling will implement the BD service fleet-wide on Diamond Offshore drilling rigs. This will create a ‘Blockchain Ready Rig’ fleet. Data Gumbo provides a Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) to industry. Data Gumbo Corporation has its headquarters in Houston, Texas (with an office in Stavanger, Norway).
Just as web browsers turned TCP/IP into the internet, Data Gumbo proclaims its use of blockchain “creates the commercial internet” across contracts/supply chain, assets, regulations and data sharing. In the case of the latter, data collaboration:
- enables aggregation of quality-controlled and standardized data from disparate sources
- shares access to data from the point(s) of collection through to customers, government, partners and vendors
- puts the this data on a blockchain, thereby allowing for payment milestones without all the traditional manual checking
- establishes one source of data.
As Data Gumbo puts it: transparency between companies and suppliers, made possible with blockchain technology, will eliminate waste and drive higher margins for all parties.
“Data Gumbo is excited to partner with Diamond Offshore, applying our industrial Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) solution in support of this first-of-its-kind Blockchain Drilling platform,” said Andrew Bruce, President and CEO of Data Gumbo Corporation.
Enterprise Times: what does it mean
The Blockchain Drilling service is an interesting combination of a cloud-based solution with 24/7 access to well construction activities and progress. It applies blockchain technology to industrial offshore drilling in a way which aims to reduce costs. By being in a cloud it is scalable and should be adaptive. In this way the modules will assist planning, tracking and reporting of the well construction value chain.
Yet, in many ways – and consistent with Data Gumbo’s knowledge, this is ‘just’ another iteration of the logic which applies blockchain to supply chains. The same principles apply, though this may be a first when it comes to deploying blockchains in hostile environments
