Baker Hughes' Kantori autonomous well construction system lifted on-bottom rate of penetration (ROP) by as much as 84% in field trials the company ran last year, and cut non-productive time to zero on one Middle East well, the company said. Kantori, launched in January, pairs AI with physics-based models and live well data to guide drilling with less manual intervention, and is meant to work alongside Baker Hughes' Corva AI platform, which runs more than 150 operational applications and 3D visualizations of well data.
What the system does
Kantori installs an edge computing device at the rig to capture sensor data from the wellbore and rig floor in real time. That data feeds a set of connected applications covering fluids monitoring, hydraulics optimization, ROP optimization and autonomous directional drilling, which can steer the bottomhole assembly (BHA) itself if an operator chooses to let it. Matthias Gatzen, Baker Hughes' executive director for digital business, said the physics-based models act as a guardrail on the AI, keeping its output inside a realistic range of well behavior. He said pairing domain expertise with AI is shaping up as the future of autonomous well placement.
Middle East: zero non-productive time
An operator in the Middle East had struggled to control an onshore pad well, with a building tendency in the 16-inch section and severe vibrations, plus instability in the 12 1/4-inch and 8 1/2-inch sections of a second well. The operator had also missed its target of landing a well within 0.6 meters of the reservoir target. On the pad's third well, Baker Hughes ran Kantori alongside its AutoTrak eXact rotary steerable system. On-bottom ROP rose 24% in the 12 1/4-inch section and 49% in the 8 1/2-inch section, the bottomhole assembly hit the pay zone 100% of the time, and non-productive time fell 100% compared with the first well.
Australia: fewer trips, faster wells
Tamboran Resources used Kantori on an unconventional drilling campaign in the Australian outback. The first well, an extended-reach well with a 3,100-meter lateral section, suffered high-frequency torsional oscillation that damaged the bottomhole assembly and forced extra trips. On the second well, a 3,600-meter lateral run with Baker Hughes' TRU-Steer rotary steerable system, Kantori helped lift average ROP 40% and reach total depth 2.5 days faster than the first well, drilling the lateral section with a single steering run and no added trips.
Argentina: gains build well over well
TotalEnergies ran Kantori on a three-well campaign on its Fenix project offshore Tierra del Fuego, delivering the wells with consistent results at or below budget. On-bottom ROP in the 12 1/4-inch sections rose 84% from the first well to the third, while weight-to-weight times fell 36%. In the 17 1/2-inch sections, ROP rose 41% and weight-to-weight times fell 25%. "When you're seeing an 84% increase in on-bottom ROP, that's a big number," Gatzen said.
Gatzen said the choice to let Kantori's software steer the BHA on its own, rather than have the crew act on its recommendations, comes down to customer preference, though he said more operators are choosing the automated option.
