Evolution in the manner in which real-time data is provided by service companies in the drilling industry has led to real-time data being available via the Internet from most wells drilled worldwide. The platform for viewing this real-time data is usually through a variety of viewers embedded in Web server software. By using technologies to enable the clear presentation of this Web-based data in real time to the end user—including data visualization, model comparison, and rig time usage—it is possible to improve real-time collaboration and perform drilling optimization actions from both a location remote to the wellsite (e.g., the operator's office or even a service company office) and the wellsite itself. By looking at three case studies in two locations (the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico), it is possible to show how technologies that enable collaboration between onshore and offshore personnel and manage drilling risks not only improve operations monitoring and reporting but reduce drilling process time. The three case studies demonstrate aid which eliminated an intermediate liner string; improved real-time understanding of well conditions by managing hole cleaning and drilling risks, ensured that a casing string could be successfully landed on bottom; and enabled cause-and-effect analysis of drilling events in real time in addition to post event analysis for improved evaluation of the drilling process. In all these cases, the use of enabling technologies within one integrated application brings advantages to the drilling process through the clear presentation of real-time drilling data, which allows easier interpretation of real-time drilling measurements. Introduction With the advent and evolution of the digital oilfield, an increased flow in real-time data is readily available to any operating company for drilling operations at any rigsite (Zachariah et al, 2002; Kartviet et al., 2003; McCann et al., 2004; Nathan et al., 2006; Milter et al., 2006; Edwards et al., 2006; Lauche et al, 2006; Gyllensten et al., 2006; Tollefsen et al., 2006). In turn, this flow of data provides drilling engineers with an improved understanding of events occurring at the rigsite in near real time and increases the data, originally only available from the daily paper report, to continuous, real-time data. But, visualization of past events and long-term trends have until now been limited by the method of visualization, e.g., via website-imbedded log packages or application-specific data-visualization packages. The next step in improving visualization and interaction with drilling data at either remote locations (for example, at client or service company offices) or at the rigsite is to improve interaction capabilities of the software to allow improved analysis and visualization of the real time data present at a web-based location. In the case of this paper, the application presented is a standalone software toolkit with the capability to simply pull data directly to any server which has adopted the Wellsite Information Transfer Standard Markup Language (WITSML) 1.31 standard; but it can additionally be used with other servers and data types. The software toolkit application is an integrated data visualization and interaction tool designed specifically for drilling optimization services. Within this paper, we present the advantages of using such an application within the drilling domain. With its significant technology enablers, the toolkit not only aids drilling optimization, but it can be used to improve collaboration and decision making by being an enabler to expertise. Expertise Enabling Technologies Within the application being presented there are a number of technologies that enable expertise to be applied easily and efficiently.

Recent accidents in the Gulf of Mexico, East Timor Sea and North Sea are, amongst others, regarded as catastrophic events by the insurance industry due to loss of life and financial loss. Traditionally, upstream insurance relies heavily on underwriting judgement for decision making. It is evident that the upstream offshore energy insurance industry lags behind other specialist insurance areas in assessing pure engineering aspects of a risk. This presents a problem in an area that requires wide engineering expertise to perform a risk assessment. Such expertise covers construction, well control, property damage, pollution, business interruption and any combination of these.Further, the impact on insurance companies has been almost overlooked by the Exploration and Production (E&P) industry as they concentrate on fulfilling their owners and regulatory requirements. Catastrophic events are considered, even within the E&P industry, as being "unfortunate". However, for the insurance companies and E&P companies they can be disastrous.These events have highlighted the importance of detailed engineering risk assessment on each area of engineering including: structures, process, control of well and construction. Within these areas, risk factors including; management and process systems, competency of personnel, technical and design details will be reviewed in detail together with pricing implications to the insurance industry.Insurance costs for E&P companies can form a substantial part of their annual expenditure, especially for new projects and new companies. Effective risk assessment, together with correct pricing, could be of benefit to all stakeholders. This paper discusses the factors relating to the risk assessment of upstream insurance projects and suggests ways of improving risk to both insurance companies and E&P operators by identifying best practice in each area of engineering. This will assist E&P companies adapting or modifying their existing operational systems and enable them to enhance their own risk management process by benchmarking against similar operators.