Web-Based Hosting of Multiassets and Multiusers Production Workflows

Abstract

Real Time production workflows introduce significant changes to the production management practices. The introduction of new technologies such as affordable satellite communication, local field area networks, global connectivity to the internet, collaborative workspace (both virtual and actual war room concepts) and data mining agents have all contributed a number of enhancements in the production arena. Although the early gains obtained during the implementation of real time workflows can be as large as increase of 50% of production in some assets, the long term gains are typically in the order of 3 to 8 %. The paper provides a number of approaches to quantify the value of enabling traditional production processes with real time information and activities. This paper also presents some inroads and lessons learnt in terms of the deployment of a new breed of real time services offered to support daily production management activities. These Activities include: Electrical Submersible Pump (ESP) monitoring and surveillance, real time productivity monitoring based on interpretation of downhole sensors and multiphase flowmeters. The analysis of over 600 installations worldwide provide insights of solutions and opportunities in varying environments covering a wide range of challenges such as North American cost sensitive context to Colombian security conscious field operations and harsh environment deployments. Among the main challenges of the real time infrastructure for the production world, is the infamous management of legacy systems (old and aging SCADA systems, archaic instrumentation, challenging production sharing agreement financial terms). The paper offers a number of recommendations, and establishes a methodology to the deployment of workflows power by real time information. A short discussion of the relative benefits of hosted services versus fully integrated solutions housed within the asset IT infrastructure provides key elements to operators to decide what would be the long term cost effective solution to be selected for a given asset. Introduction The need for real-time or relevant data feed to support production workflows is not new. Permanent monitoring devices have been in use in the oil field industry since the beginning of the century for surface applications (earlier in the form of pressure and temperature strip charts). The field of downhole instrumentation has been tackled in various ways since the early 60s. Engel (1963) introduced an electromechanical gauge and showed data from 1959–1961. Since the mid 70s permanent electronic gauges have been deployed in wells on dry completions, and subsea in the early 80s (Bezerra et al, 1992). The value of such measurements was well recognized at that time, and it is not surprising that they are becoming more and more popular in the upstream oil and gas arena. The recent evolution of various information technologies brings new possibilities for deploying monitoring services to facilitate production workflow. The Digital Oil Field of the Future (DOFF) study, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Inc., (CERA, 2003) identifies monitoring and control as one of five key technologies that will impact the oil and gas industry in the future. With a number of such implementations already in place, it is now possible to provide examples and recommendations for a successful realization of these technologies in the production environment. However, the full realization of the value of any real time workflows lies beyond the availability of an organized and contextualized form of the production data sets. In other words, this is not just a data management issue. Automation of data acquisition, including data validation and data preparation, are key aspects of a real-time workflow. Likewise, the systematic computation of key performance indicators and the ability to generate events based on these computations, such that alarm status of well and network performance can be updated automatically, are the gems that benefit production management.

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