Sand production is very common in the gas wells of the Adriatic Sea. Accurate field surveys have been conducted before and after sand production has occurred in wells where no sand control methods had been initially introduced. Unlike the numerous other papers dealing with sand production, this one describes the sand production observed in low permeability gas-bearing formations which include a significant amount of clays. The main parameters inducing sand production are identified and an empirical correlation is established which enables its prediction. Moreover, the influence of parameters such as depth, drawdown, depletion, gas rate, water gas ratio etc. on the occurrence of sand production is determined. The paper also reports the results of a sand flow test performed in a gas field situated in the surveyed area. Finally, these results are discussed in terms of geological history of the Northern Adriatic Basin.

In the last decade, upstream oil industry faced an exponential increase of the use of real-time data, which lead to numerous digital oilfield (DOF) implementations. These have demonstrated the value to drive operations efficiency, optimize production, and maximize hydrocarbon recovery with better, faster decisions while reducing health, environmental and safety risks.Since the appearance of computers and the internet, many enabling technologies entered the oil-patch. Over the years, various areas improved as a result of significant commercial, corporate and academic efforts. However, some specific concerns remain be the same as a decade ago: data, value proposition, work processes, people skills and other aspects of change management. This paper focuses on the best practices that have made DOF implementations successful and the hard lessons learned. Many DOF implementations failed to deliver the expected value because of poor practices and misconceptions. These are presented in four interrelated areas: people, automated workflows, processes and technologies.

Implementing asset-wide intelligent digital oilfield (iDOF) solutions is more complex than simply "integrating technology." For iDOF to be truly successful and achieve expectations, concepts from different fields, such as artificial intelligence (AI) or soft computing techniques, must be used to help orchestrate the technology and required functionality to deliver the "intelligence" required to meet the challenges associated with optimizing oil production. Fuzzy logic (FzL) is a type of probabilistic logic that is approximate as opposed to being precise or exact. FzL can have a range of truth values or determine a likelihood of being true.The process of diagnosis for artificial lift systems has always relied solely on the engineer's criteria when analyzing data. It is not uncommon for two engineers with similar backgrounds to have, on the basis of the same data, differing opinions of a well problem. It is, however, uncommon that both engineers are either completely incorrect or correct in their judgment, which begs the question as to why this occurs. When traditional binary logic (true or false) is used for well analysis, the outcomes must be either this or that, simply because of the nature of binary logic. Unfortunately, most of the time, the results of well diagnoses, especially when attempting to use a predictive approach, cannot be properly represented with a yes-no approach, which means both engineers would be correct to a certain degree; in FzL, this is called the "degree of truth." FzL incorporates the rationale of having different degrees of truth into the world of well diagnosis and adds tremendous value by raising the issue of different conditions having certain degrees of truth of being in development.The FzL in this solution was built on a set of worldwide expert rules and converts these rules to their mathematical equivalents. Production operation's expert rules are used to formulate the conditional statements that comprise FzL (e.g., if the motor temperature exceeds a certain limit, the pump can burn out). This paper discusses how the AI tool determines trends by calculating a slope for a predetermined period of time for the different sensor signals and compares these sets of trends with pre-established sets of rules. The closeness of the measured trends to the models is expressed as "conditioners" that represent the likelihood of each trend occurring over a period of time.This technique has proven to be very useful in real-time monitoring for production engineers, helping them to perform fast predictions and pump diagnostics to predict unexpected problems, such as pump wear, gas interference, tubing leaks, viscous forces, and solids-plugged intakes. Several case histories are discussed in this paper. The ultimate goal of this smart flow is to deliver field-level actions that extend pump life and reduce pump downtime.

Oil production from North Kuwait carbonate reservoirs are challenging because of factors, such as high permeability streaks, poor microscopic sweep efficiency, and low mobility ratios, all of which can dramatically impair production rates and oil recoveries. Despite tremendous efforts related to waterflood research, oil recovery in carbonates typically remains low. New technology and approaches are required to increase and sustain oil production to access and drain immense amounts of remaining oil-in-place.This paper presents the results of collaborative work procedures applied to a selective number of wells to increase production performance in the Sabriyah Mauddud field pilot under the Kuwait Integrated Digital Field (KwIDF) project umbrella. KwIDF is part of a comprehensive strategy undertaken by an operator to enhance overall oil production by the application of digital oilfield (DOF) concepts, which involves (1) well instrumentation to provide enhanced real-time data availability, (2) upgraded power and communications infrastructure to support field instrumentation and control real-time data, (3), creating collaborative decision centers to enhance asset team processes across physically separate locations, and (4) providing a platform to increase effectiveness through automating work processes and to shorten observation-to-action cycle time.The Sabriyah KwIDF pilot involves 44 producer and five injector wells producing about 7% of total Sabriyah field production. The main objective of this effort was to maximize and sustain oil rates and reduce well decline while honoring safe well operating envelope constraints. As a result of this effort, production gains have been certified in 10 wells of the pilot area to date. This success has been achieved by carefully analyzing past performance and adjusting well settings to realtime production conditions using the operator's digital infrastructure.This paper describes how this optimization methodology provides improvements to short-term production rates while honoring safe well operating envelope and presents case histories illustrating the benefits from the automated workflows and collaborative decision approach. The average sustained oil gain was 395 BOPD, or 37%. The total sustained oil gain reached 3,949 BOPD (34%), with a cumulative production gain of 756 thousand barrels for the evaluation period.

Summary This paper discusses the design and execution of dual-zone gravel packs in very shaly and silty formations of median sand grain size less than 30 um. An oversized gravel was selected for sand control and, as consequence, the openhole gravel-pack technique was adopted to reduce the effect of intermixing between formation and gravel-pack sand. During the completions in the first five wells, we encountered and solved several operational problems, including those involving (1) borehole stability, (2) setting of inflatable packer for zone isolation, (3) hole preparation, and (4) gravel placement. From the lessons we learned, another 11 wells were completed with dual openhole gravelpacks without significant problems. After 1 year of production, the flow performance from the wells met or exceeded the initial objectives. Introduction The Giovanna field is a gas-bearing reservoir situated in the offshore Adriatic area (Fig. 1). It is a multiplayer reservoir comprising 30producing intervals that consist of thin interbedded layers of partially unconsolidated sand and shale. The total pay zone has a thickness of more than700 m and is located at depths between 1200 and 2000 m. As a result of the small grain size of the sand and the high clay content, the reservoir rock has a very low effective gas permeability (10 to 30 md). To develop this reservoir, it was necessary to make provisions for a completion that would prevent the movement of the incompetent sands. Because of the low formation permeability, sand consolidation was immediately rejected as a suitable technique for providing sand control and consideration was given to mechanical methods (gravel packing). In many cases, the inside-casing gravel pack (ICGP) introduces a large pressure drop across the completion,1 with a consequent reduction in the production capacity and performance of the well. This result is especially true when, as in this case, a very small size of gravel (100 to 120 U.S. mesh)is required. On the other hand, the openhole gravel pack (OHGP) generally is not recommended in the presence of clays because there is a high probability of intermixing with gravel. After careful analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each of these techniques, we decided provisionally to complete all 16 wells with OHGP's in dual parallel completion. With only 16 wells available to develop the reservoir, it was necessary to combine the 30 producing intervals into 11 producing pools. This decision was based on homogeneous pore pressure and depletion of the commingled producing intervals. As a result, it was necessary to complete long intervals (40 to 60m) for the exploitation of the gas resources. Because no previous experience has been gained with gravel-pack completions in very fine and silty sand, we decided to proceed with the following course of action.Perform a sand-flow test (SFT) to verify that sand production would occur.Execute a dual OHGP in the first well to ascertain the feasibility and efficiency of this type of completion. Furthermore, a single ICGP was executed at a later stage and confirmed that the OHGP was the most appropriate completion for the Giovanna field. This paper will illustrate the problems encountered, the remedies introduced, and the results obtained from these completions, with particular reference to (1) evaluation of the risk of sand production, (2) gravel-size selection, (3) borehole stability, (4) zone isolation, (5) hole preparation,(6) gravel placement, and (7) flow efficiency.