Performed by Schlumberger

In 2017, 444 projects competed for the Chairman’s Award. As the program’s highest honor, the award recognizes one project as an outstanding example of the company’s core values: our people, our commitment to technology, and our determination to produce superior profits.

The team for the Achieving Excellence: The Longest Well Ever project won this year’s Chairman’s Award for its work with the Sakhalin-1 Consortium to drill a 49,212-ft extended-reach well on the Orlan Platform offshore Sakhalin, Russia.

This set a new benchmark for extended-reach drilling that exceeds the previous record by 4,921 ft. Historically, new drilling records have been characterized by incremental gains in measured depth, and this new benchmark was achieved in a technically challenging subarctic, frontier environment.

The Sakhalin Extended-Reach Drilling Center of Excellence integrated the domain expertise and technology from 10 Schlumberger product lines and worked closely with the Sakhalin-1 Consortium during the two years it took to plan and drill this well in the Chayvo field—with drilling completed in 103 days. This successful collaboration achieved a 37% increase in the rate of penetration compared with the previous extended-reach drilling record from 2015.