Drilling Contracts: What the Published Record Proves

Operators justify integrated, incentive and turnkey drilling contracts with published cases reporting large gains. Those cases are written by the parties to the contracts, and they are the only public evidence there is. Most of the world's oil comes from fields past their plateau, where arresting decline means many similar wells drilled repeatedly into a known profile over programmes of years, and the controllable losses live in the delivery system. Well times in such a programme fall with cumulative wells under any contract, and that learning curve is the yardstick against which any claim for a contract form has to be judged.

Geologic® asked how much of that record survives a sceptical reader, and what the same papers disclose about the terms a negotiator needs. A documented search of two indexes produced a corpus of 59 papers from 1970 to 2024, each read page by page, of which 36 report outcomes of an implemented contract. Every paper was graded twice under the same written rules, each grading blind to the other, with every answer tied to a page and a short quotation and every disagreement adjudicated against the text by the author. No paper reaches the top grade, because no outcome in the record was produced or verified by a disinterested party. One paper, from 1997, prints a baseline, defined metrics and a well count that would let a reader recompute its gain; the other thirty-five do not. The one measured effect is small: the only concurrent comparison gives an incremental gain of two to four percentage points against a published headline of eight. Disclosure has thinned as integration deepened, with thirteen of the eighteen outcomes papers before 2000 printing a payment value against one of the eleven since 2013. The review closes by ranking what an operator should buy, by what the record shows to be missing and what an operator can verify on a live contract: the measurement and the right to audit it, then continuity, then incentives, then workforce architecture.