Oil & Gas Engineering

Project Scheduling Software for Oil & Gas Engineering Teams

A deepwater rig runs $250,000 to $500,000 a day whether it is drilling or waiting on a missing part, so every schedule decision on an oil and gas project carries a dollar figure most industries never see. A hitch-rotation crew, a BOP stack with a 20-week lead time, and a BSEE permit desk that can outrun the drill bit itself don't fit on a generic task list. Maverick schedules the equipment, materials, and rotating crew positions behind an oil and gas project as first-class resources, so the Gantt chart reflects the whole operation — not just labor hours.

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The Oil & Gas Value Chain, Project by Project

The underlying mechanics — subproject hierarchy, dependency links, three resource types, milestones, and baselines — carry across every stage below. What changes is which constraint actually threatens the finish date.

1

Upstream Exploration & Drilling

Offshore deepwater campaigns and onshore unconventional/shale pad drilling both run on the same mechanics: a hitch-rotation crew, long-lead BOP and casing procurement, and a wellbore sequence that is physically fixed. The project type behind the blueprint below.

2

Well Completion & Production Start-Up

Perforation, hydraulic fracturing or stimulation, and well testing lead up to first oil or first gas — tracked as a zero-duration milestone that everything upstream exists to hit and everything downstream, including revenue recognition, starts counting from.

3

Midstream Gathering & Pipeline Construction

Right-of-way easements, HDD crossings under roads and waterways, and multi-segment tie-ins run as subprojects linked with Finish-to-Start dependencies, so a permitting delay on one easement doesn't silently absorb into the rest of the corridor.

4

Downstream Refinery Turnarounds & Shutdowns

A planned outage compresses thousands of inspection, repair, and recertification tasks into a two-to-six-week window with a surge of contractor crews. Subproject hierarchy keeps each process unit's task list separate while still rolling up to one turnaround schedule.

5

Decommissioning & Plug-and-Abandonment

Well plugging sequence, rig-to-reef or removal logistics, and final regulatory closure sign-off are scheduled the same way the original build was — against a locked baseline, with the last milestone gating site release.

Rig Economics Drive Every Scheduling Decision

The daily cost of a drilling rig is unlike any other line item in a capital project — the meter runs whether the rig is drilling, waiting on weather, or waiting on a signature.

Rig Type Typical Water Depth Day Rate Range Primary Schedule Risk Cost of a 1-Week Slip
Jackup0–400 ft$40K–$120K/dayWind/wave limits during mat setting$280K–$840K
Semi-Submersible (mid-water)400–1,500 ft$150K–$280K/dayBOP maintenance windows$1.1M–$2.0M
Semi-Submersible (deepwater)1,500–10,000 ft$250K–$500K/dayProcurement lead times; weather downtime$1.75M–$3.5M
Drillship (ultra-deepwater)3,000–12,000+ ft$300K–$600K/dayStation-keeping; riser fatigue management$2.1M–$4.2M
Platform Rig (comparison)Fixed depth$15K–$60K/daySlot availability; existing production interference$105K–$420K

At a nominal $320,000/day, a 72-hour slip on a deepwater semi-submersible erases nearly a million dollars before the first barrel is produced — the same math worked through in the offshore drilling blueprint below.

Built for Oil & Gas Scheduling

The same scheduling mechanics, mapped to what actually happens on a drilling campaign, pipeline build, or turnaround.

Human resource icon Machine resource icon Materials resource icon

Critical Path Method

Recalculates as the schedule changes, so a BOP procurement order or a BSEE permit application — not the rig crew — is correctly identified as the actual constraint on the finish date.

Learn about critical path

Three Resource Types

Hitch-rotation crew roles, rig and third-party equipment, and drilling consumables all live on the same resource-centric Gantt chart and get checked for conflicts together.

See resource types

Resource Allocation Chart

Flags a Directional Driller or BSEE inspector double-booked across overlapping tasks in red, before that single-person constraint quietly controls the critical path.

See the allocation chart

Project Baselines

Locks the plan before spud, with ghost bars proving a 20-week BOP procurement task was in the original plan — not something discovered mid-campaign.

Learn about baselines

AI Chat Project Creation

Describe a campaign in plain language — phases, hitch crew roles, procurement lead times — and AI chat drafts the full schedule for review, the way the blueprint below was built.

See AI chat project creation

Per-Employee AI Model Assignment

A drilling engineer running critical path analysis and a company man checking tomorrow's assignments can each run a different AI model — no single account forced on the whole crew.

See AI provider setup

See It in a Real Drilling Campaign Schedule

A worked example, built entirely by AI chat — plus how Maverick compares to the tool oil and gas teams already know.

Deepwater Drilling Campaign — Block 42 Well GC-785

Seven phases from rig mobilization to demobilization, a hitch-rotation crew and BOP stack built as named resources through AI chat alone, a Finish-to-Finish tie-in pinning BOP and riser pressure tests together, and a critical path that runs through a permit desk and a purchase order as often as it runs through the drill bit.

Walk Through the Blueprint

How Maverick Compares to the Incumbent

Maverick vs. Primavera P6 Professional

How Maverick's cloud scheduling compares to the tool most upstream operators and drilling contractors already run, on critical path, resources, and cost of ownership.

Read the comparison

Maverick vs. Primavera P6 EPPM

How Maverick compares to P6 Enterprise for operators running a multi-well drilling program or a portfolio of pipeline and turnaround projects.

Read the comparison

Report on the Schedule Without a Maverick Login

Operating partners, financiers, and regulators usually want status outside the scheduling tool itself.

Power BI Dashboards

Build schedule health, Gantt timeline, and milestone dashboards from live Maverick project data, so a partner or regulator can check drilling or turnaround status without a login.

See the Power BI dashboards

Live OData Feed

Pull projects, tasks, resources, and costs directly into Power BI, Excel, or any OData v4 client via the built-in feed — all 11 entity sets documented with ready-to-paste M queries.

See the OData schema reference

Common Questions From Oil & Gas Engineering Teams

What drilling contractors, EPC teams, and operators ask before switching their scheduling.

Yes. A human resource in Maverick can represent a crew position filled by rotating personnel — such as Driller (Hitch Rotation) or Toolpusher (Hitch Rotation) — rather than one named employee, so the schedule reflects the role that is always staffed, not a specific person who is off-hitch half the time.
Blowout preventer stacks and riser systems are tracked as machine resources with a procurement lead time — often 16 to 52 weeks — entered directly as a task duration. When that lead time is the true constraint on the finish date, it shows up on the critical path as a purchase order, not a delay attributed to the rig crew.
Yes. A Finish-to-Finish dependency lets the BOP pressure test and the riser pressure test run independently and in parallel, while requiring both to confirm pressure integrity before the next milestone — usually spud — can begin, instead of forcing them into an artificially sequential Finish-to-Start chain.
Maverick delivers the same critical path method and resource scheduling discipline oil and gas teams rely on in P6, in a cloud-based interface with AI-assisted schedule building, at a fraction of the licensing, training, and administration cost — without an Oracle implementation project.
Yes. Both are typically single-visit or single-person specialist roles on a drilling campaign, and the resource allocation bar chart flags an overlapping assignment in red the moment two tasks requiring that specialist are scheduled in parallel instead of at the correct discrete intervals.
Yes. The same subproject hierarchy and dependency links that sequence a wellbore also apply to pipeline tie-ins, HDD crossings, and the compressed, high-density task lists of a multi-week refinery turnaround or planned shutdown.
Assign a day rate as the cost of the rig resource, and AI chat can calculate the dollar exposure of a projected slip on request — the same prompt pattern used against the offshore drilling rig blueprint below.
Yes. A conversational session can create the phase structure, suggest and assign material, machine, and human resources by exact name, wire FS, SS, and FF dependencies, and identify the critical path — the exact sequence used to build the Block 42 offshore drilling blueprint below without a single task entered manually.

Schedule Your Next Oil & Gas Project

No credit card required. See how Maverick handles hitch-rotation crews, long-lead procurement, and critical path in a free trial.

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