Digital Twin and Big Data Technologies Benefit Oilfield Management

Abstract

The oil & gas industry has been value added from our digital assets since this new century, which helped our industry dig out more advanced algorithm, more robust logic to address the challenge from HPHT wells and deep-water wells. Nowadays the operators are facing much more challenges in oilfield management especially how to improve their decision efficiency and situation awareness. Thanks to the different sensors we deployed on oilfield from drilling to completion and production, tremendous data contributed to the digital asset we are having now. The digital twin makes oilfield management much easier than ever before, hundreds of wells’ performance could be displayed in front of the decision maker or key management level of oil companies, and big data technique helps them get easy understanding of real time behavior on well construction progress, cost management, pain spot of each project. Combining these two methods, it is possible to have an up-to-date awareness of oilfield development status and perceptual intuition to very detail situations. There is a major operator manages over 200 wells per year and some of these wells are challenging exploration well with measured depth over 20000ft which requires experienced team to get the well to total depth, also a lot of shale gas wells with lateral intervals over 8000ft which demands intensive control of cost. All above operations or targets need be done under a safe and efficient way, then the management team taking digital twins to monitor the real time well status which help them get up to date information about whole oilfield status like drilling, completion, production and more. Big data analysis is also used to help enhance the decision- making efficiency and overcome puzzles that traditional method could not solved, like recommending the best practice way on well construction engineering parameters, or ROI (return on investment) assess. The oil company could achieve a better management level with less human resources and much more workload. By the advantages of digital twins and big data analysis, the oil company now managing more than 200 drilling rigs and 300 completion wells in the high efficiency way, and now involving the production wells into next phase digital construction target. Furthermore, considering develop an integrative digital twin of geology and engineering map which get whole formation and well construction more intuitive. Besides, it is proven that digital method like digital twins and big data technique could improve the skill of oilfield management significantly, which optimized the resource and expenditures investigated in modern oil and gas industry.

Identification of influence of digital twin technologies on production systems: a return on investment-based approach

“…Digital twin technologies were used in the Field Development Process (FDP) of petroleum industry to improve the financial impact of investments. This approach tries to convert the digital twin deployment into financial indicators [14]. Digital twin deployment can also support measuring bridge condition performance state.…”