Digitalization of Rig-Less Interventions Management in Giant Middle Eastern Oil Fields – A Novel Collaborative AI Solution for Improving Production Performance and Optimization
Authors: Reddicharla Nagaraju , Elabrashy Manar Maher Mohamed , Venkata Subba Ramarao Rachapudi , Selvamoorthy Geetha , Ali Mayada Ali Sultan 
Published: February 2025

When field matured, reservoir and well conditions are continuously changing and deteriorating, production declines rapidly due to an increase in water cut, lift equipment inefficiencies, lack of sufficient reservoir pressure support or surface back pressure bottlenecks. Consequently, the percentage of idle & inactive wells has dramatically increased over the last few years with opportunities to rejuvenate reservoirs and wells being lost or postponed for months or even years. Resources utilization at right candidate is critical concern to improve the profitability by minimizing OPEX and CAPEX. The middle east field operator established one of kind data driven solution to integrate planning, execution and performance analysis for handling rig-less intervention and reservoir monitoring activities.

Rig-less work intervention has been the most dynamic field operations in the view of daily workload, number of packages, size of manpower, logistic arrangement, and budget allocation. It is common that well planning is exposed to a constant and frequent adjustment in weekly or more than often in daily basis. The main drivers of these changes are in-accuracy of candidate selection, overlooked well inventory, un-readiness well site, SIMOPS operations, or logistic arrangement.

The digital solution has been built on data driven analytics and automation across all processes of rig-less interventions. It provides auto recommendations for potential candidates for pressure surveys based on historical data and well performance. The solution ranks and priorities rig-less intervention candidates based on technical complexity, economics, and logistics. The Integrated collaborative platform automates the entire process, allows you to create an end-to-end plan for all jobs, schedule and improved right through to the end of that job. Post work-over job analysis is incorporated to assess job success and further integrated to improve the knowledge base. Rig-less utilization KPIs are calculated based on productive and non-productive events. Generative natural language search has been embedded in the system to provide guided search experience with suggestions based on relevance and historical queries.

The field operator has successfully implemented this platform across four giant oil fields and one gas field. It has helped create more realistic plans and track progress against the plan. This solution has reduced 60% decision making time. It has integrated best practices and lessons learned. It helped easily to analyze the cause of NPT events and track performance of your standard practices to drive increase efficiency by 50%. It improves an improvement of in rig less package utilization by rig-less operation clustering that translates to potential cost saving per year for a giant oil field. The planning process and rig-less unit allocation was improved by monitoring the KPIs.

Digital transformation is critical to improve efficiency in rig-less interventions. Data driven accurate planning and collaborative operations aided by digital automation can significantly improve transparency and decision making.