Development of a Marginal Gas-Condensate Field Using a Novel Integrated Reservoir and Production Management Approach

Abstract

This paper outlines how data acquisition, data analysis, and control actions, can be implemented remotely and in real time to enhance the reservoir and production management process. System components, their integration, and the opportunity they offer to implement reservoir and production management work processes based on real-time data will be discussed and exemplified. We will show how such a system can be implemented on a field. For this, we will utilize the planned installation of such a system in the Huldra gas/condensate field in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea. We will describe how "closed-loop control" for reservoir and production management will be implemented on this field, and give examples from work processes on real-time data leading to faster and better decision support, and, finally, decision making and implementation. Introduction Over the past fifteen years, reservoir management has improved significantly in several ways. Most notably, two technology "waves" have made important contributions to increased value creation - namely reservoir modeling and simulation, and advanced drilling. Reservoir modeling and simulation allowed for detailed analyses of the reservoir, facilitating the understanding of the reservoir behavior in a much better way than before, and allowing for far better predictions. In fact, in the North Sea, this technology is regarded as being the single most important contributor to improved oil recovery from about the mid eighties and a decade onwards. The next wave was advanced drilling. It allowed for locating wells in undrained areas in a very accurate manner. Referring again to the North Sea, advanced drilling combined with reservoir modeling and simulation are considered as the most important factors for value adding from the mid nineties and onwards.

Real-Time Asset Management: From Vision to Engagement—An Operator's Experience

“…Several papers have presented improved well monitoring and reservoir description using continuous downhole data. [8][9][10][11][12] . However, a challenge at this level is preparing the data for continuous analysis by including data and processing validation algorithms.…”

Implementing Real-Time Asset Management: A Practical Perspective

“…The transformation of the data into meaningful information becomes an important solution component. For heavily instrumented fields, up to 100 million data point may be collected every day 11 . Clearly, it becomes an almost impossible task to inspect all these data manually.…”

Rapid Model Updating with Right-Time Data—Ensuring Models Remain Evergreen for Improved Reservoir Management

“…This real-time data is now routinely used for reservoir monitoring, flow assurance calculations, production optimization 8,9,10 and for reservoir engineering analysis 11 . However, despite many good intentions 12,13 , reservoir modeling has been slow to take up the use of real-time production data to condition its models. While there have been some promising projects using Ensemble Kalman Filtering to update reservoir models 14,15 , these have mostly been research oriented and have not yet made it into mainstream use.…”