Saving $4.2M Across a Drilling Campaign by Turning Free-Text Reports into Structured Decisions with Generative AI

The client is a US-based upstream operator with active drilling across major shale basins. The company runs multi-well campaigns where each horizontal well costs roughly $4 million. Decisions about the next well depend on what happened during the last one. Those decisions start with daily drilling reports.

01 The Challenge

Years of drilling intelligence locked inside free-text reports that no one had time to read

Non-Productive Time (NPT) is one of the most persistent cost drivers in upstream drilling. It accounts for up to 25% of total rig time across the industry. Stuck pipe incidents alone cost operators over $250 million per year globally. For shale operators running 100-well campaigns, even small improvements in NPT compound into millions saved.

For the client, the information needed to reduce NPT already existed inside daily drilling reports. DDRs capture what happened on the rig each day: equipment failures, circulation losses, stuck pipe events, standby time. Across years of drilling, the client had accumulated thousands of these reports. Together they contained a detailed history of what went wrong, where, and why.

The opportunity was in format. Daily drilling reports (DDRs) are written in free text by rig crews. Language is inconsistent. Abbreviations vary. What one driller calls “stuck pipe” another logs as “tight hole.” Reading each report and classifying events by hand took weeks per campaign. The client’s drilling engineers wanted to spend their time on analysis, not data extraction.

02 The Approach

Build the data layer first, then apply generative AI to the reports

The client’s drilling data was scattered across SCADA systems, Excel logs, and siloed sources. Before any AI could process the reports, the data had to be consolidated into a single store.

Provectus, an AI-first systems integrator, structured the engagement in two parts. First, build an Integrated Energy Data Platform aligned with OSDU principles. It would unify structured and unstructured drilling data. Second, deploy a generative AI application to extract, classify, and analyze NPT events from the daily drilling reports.

The GenAI work centered on selecting and calibrating a domain-specific LLM. Off-the-shelf models would not work here. Drilling language is specialized. The difference between a flagged NPT event and a missed one can be a single word choice.

Provectus worked directly with drilling engineers to validate model outputs at every stage. That collaboration built the trust needed to move from prototype to production.

03 The Build

Data platform, domain-tuned LLM, and automated NPT classification across 13 risk categories

The Integrated Energy Data Platform ingests data from SCADA systems, field logs, and historical archives. It unifies everything into a single queryable layer. This gave the GenAI application a clean, consistent dataset to work against.

The core is a domain-tuned LLM that reads daily drilling reports and extracts NPT events automatically. The model classifies events across 13 risk categories. Stuck pipe, circulation losses, equipment failure, weather delays, wellbore instability. For each event, it captures duration, root cause, and operational context.

The calibration ran iteratively. Provectus processed over 1,500 DDR entries through the model. Drilling engineers reviewed outputs and refined the classification logic. The model reached over 94% alignment with expert-labeled data. Events that engineers would have caught on close reading, but missed during bulk review, started appearing.

The classified data feeds into cross-well trend analysis. The planning team sees which NPT categories recur across wells and which basins have higher incident rates. Patterns that span multiple wells surface automatically. Campaign-level benchmarking now runs in hours.

04 The Results

From weeks of manual report review to under two hours, with $4.2M saved across one campaign

The first result was visibility. The model detected NPT events that had gone unreported in the original DDRs. Events classified as “operations” or “standby” contained real NPT that had never been quantified. AI-discovered NPT amounted to 7% of total reported NPT. That equals $42,000 per well.

$4.2M

In drilling cost savings

One full month of rig time saved across 100 wells

Drilling engineers saw a 30% productivity increase. Analysis that consumed weeks of reading and classifying now completes in under two hours. Engineers shifted from data extraction to the work that requires their expertise: interpreting patterns and adjusting well plans.

“The routine review of reports could takes us weeks, now it is much faster — hours. We can identify root causes of Non-Productive Time and save millions in operational costs with a click.” · VP of Drilling Operations

Across the 100-well campaign, the savings added up. $4 million in drilling costs. One full month of rig time recovered. Engineering staff reallocated from manual data review to high-value analysis.

05 What’s Next

A drilling intelligence platform that gets smarter with every campaign

Every new campaign adds more DDRs to the platform. Every new report refines the model’s understanding of the client’s drilling patterns and risk profile. Provectus works with the client on extending AI capabilities into additional upstream workflows.