The present article analyzes the technological advancement and innovations related to drilling operations. It covers the review of currently proven and emerging technologies that could mitigate the drilling operational deficiencies and instabilities that could hinder operational performance activities and the economic part of drilling development with great effort to minimize their environmental footprint. Drilling system design and operations are among the major aspects and cost-effective endeavors of the oil and gas industries, which are therefore technology dependent. They are also considered to be among the most expensive operations in the world, as they require huge expenses daily. Drilling success, depending on prevalent conditions, is a function of several general factors. These include the selection of the best technologies and tools, procedural optimization, concrete problem-solving, accurate prediction, and rapid decision-making. Consequently, any sorts of tools or advanced technologies that can improve the time-efficient operational and economic performance of drilling activities are essential and demanded. The paper provides a review of available technologies and developmental innovations based on both company-based and academic research-enabled drilling solutions over the past 5 years in the field of drilling systems and technological design. The paper further highlighted potential technologies that could be tapped in from other industries and could possibly be adopted by pushing the conventional boundaries of drilling operations.

The Industry 4.0 is here, and advanced technologies are widely available for domains such oil and gas which are traditionally slow in adopting extreme new technologies. This paper presents the design architecture and implementation of effective data acquisition (DAQ) and monitoring system applied to an experimental sucker rod pumping unit for both event occurrence and educational purpose using latest technological advancements and industry 4.0 principles. The designed framework allows control and monitoring of analog and digital sensors configured in a decentralized generation structure. This system controls the values of the sampling frequency, range of channels, the number of points to acquire and then retrieves the data acquired from the operation of a sucker rod pump setup. National Instruments LabVIEW was used for the solution architecture presented in this study data collection and diagnostic analysis. Some of the operational physical parameters analysed and monitored include pressure, fluid production rate, valve leakage, pump efficiency, vibrations and energy consumption. The proposed architecture can be built easily with very low energy consumption, high reliability, ample flexibility for quicker data retrieval and prospective future modifications.