Drilling Intelligence

The decision loop is moving closer to the bit. Gunnar Energy Services reported roughly two weeks of rig time saved on one US intercept by ranging from inside the drill string, and SLB and Valeura Energy cut survey-related rig time 78-89% on two Gulf of Thailand wells. Also inside: at-bit images, offset risk in the live loop, and control inside the BHA.

The unit of digital-drilling adoption is moving from the well to the portfolio. Edition 21: SLB will deploy DrillPlan across TotalEnergies' global upstream portfolio under a 15-year agreement; ExxonMobil and H&P plan to take FlexRobotics from 2 to 9 rig-floor systems within 12 months; an Aramco and SLB paper automates survey QC; and an SPE view keeps engineers on final approval.

The next digital bottleneck in drilling is the handoff, not the stage. Edition 20: Vår Energi compresses well-concept maturation from weeks to days by re-engineering how disciplines hand off work; a downhole motor-diagnostics study pushes fault detection toward the sensor; Nabors folds managed pressure drilling into its rig operating system; and Valaris earns a barrier-assurance award for BarrierPulse. Plus Fervo's Cape Station commercial operation and a GA Drilling hard-rock

This week the test for drilling automation shifted from 'does it work' to 'does it hold across hundreds of wells.' SLB won four multi-year integrated well-construction contracts from Aramco covering more than 450 wells; WesCan steered a seven-leg multilateral to TD in 13 days; Fervo reported first power at Cape Station; Zefiro drilled a first carbon-storage well by redeploying a plugging crew; and a new patent application puts +/-10,000 lbf on a quiet weight-on-bit error. Sca

Halliburton's multi-year Eni contract for the Cronos development bundles automation and remote operations into the well-construction scope, while deepwater managed pressure drilling standardizes inside the rig operating system. This week, automation stops being a pilot and becomes infrastructure.

Edition 17 argues the next autonomy bottleneck in drilling is decision trust: the confidence to act on a model's output. Corva reports up to 1.2 rig days saved on predictive bit-wear in Oman, YPF renews its real-time program, and Aquila Engineering's Iris cuts BOP troubleshooting from hours to under five minutes. The through-line: validation, accountability, and human oversight as engineering.

The hard problem in drilling automation has moved from the algorithm to the interface. H&P released a standardized RSS-downlink API schema to the D-WIS interoperability workgroup, Mazama Energy reported an 80% cut in drilling days on its Athena geothermal well, and Baker Hughes, SLB, and Nabors each placed integration bets across mature-field AI, offshore CO2 storage, and deep geothermal.

The through-line this week: named commitments are replacing pilots. bp awards Halliburton an integrated drilling and evaluation contract with LOGIX automation on the Bumerangue appraisal offshore Brazil; NOV and Well ID report real-time borehole imaging and caliper data through wired drill pipe; and FutureOn, Elementz and DNV move integrity work into structured decision tools.

ExxonMobil has set a target of putting robots on roughly half its Permian rig floors by 2028, and its first automated rig drilled the third-fastest well in company history. Edition #14 works through what that ramp proves, what it does not, and the day-rate step-down clause to put in your 2027 rig contracts.

Four new ways AI and automation entered drilling this month, above the rig, on the rig, and before the spud. WillCo maps each one and what it does, and does not yet, prove.

This Edition at a Glance ADNOC's AD-300 enters live commercial operation as the first AI-enabled walking island rig to execute closed-loop autonomous drilling without continuous driller override on a producing field. Halliburton consolidates LOGIX and DrillTronics into a unified autonomous drilling stack, validated in Guyana with ExxonMobil in the industry's first fully integrated closed-loop automated well placement. SLB reports 2.4 million feet of automated drilling footage

Why This Edition Matters The signal this week is not a product launch - it is a structural shift. Major OFS vendors are no longer positioning digital as a service enhancement bundled into footage contracts. They are building discrete financial identities around their digital portfolios, assigning investor-facing revenue targets, and restructuring commercial terms accordingly. That transition has direct consequences for every operator with an active digital services agreement:

WillCo Digital Drilling Intelligence Report | Edition #3 Week of Jun 08 – Jun 14, 2026 | willcodrilling.com This Edition at a Glance • Pre-conference announcement quiet reveals cybersecurity as the underacknowledged attack surface in distributed offshore computer vision deployments. • A published Bayesian network case study quantifies how probabilistic fault modeling cuts stuck-pipe NPT prediction error by a measurable margin over deterministic methods. • Freeze late-stage ve