Implementing an Integrated Production Surveillance and Optimization System
Authors: Carpenter Chris 
Published: March 2018

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper SPE 187222, “Creating Value by Implementing an Integrated Production Surveillance and Optimization System—An Operator’s Perspective,” by Sathish Sankaran, David Wright, and Huan Gamblin, Anadarko, and Dhilip Kumar, iLink Systems, prepared for the 2017 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, San Antonio, Texas, USA, 8–11 October. The paper has not been peer reviewed.

The complete paper describes some of the technical challenges faced in deepwater operations and the methodology adopted for implementing an integrated production surveillance and optimization (IPSO) system to mitigate the risks. The IPSO (deepwater-digital-oilfield) system is designed to be a combination of emerging information and communications technologies, intelligent algorithms, and fit-for-purpose asset-management work flows.

The IPSO System

The vision of the digital oil field is to foster an environment where work is performed with fit-for-purpose tools and streamlined work flows to measure, model, and control the field by enabling people to make the right decisions at the right time. This is enabled through a seamless decision hierarchy (Fig. 1) that achieves integrated asset management across business processes, the hydrocarbon value chain, and temporal scales. This multiscale optimization is handled by dividing the challenge into subproblems and passing down decisions from each level as targets for lower-level processes, while system outputs are considered as feedback loops to correct actions.

A fit-for-purpose digital-oilfield system, IPSO, was developed to optimize base production through real-time surveillance and efficient reservoir management. The system automates routine tasks such as data capture, data manipulation, preliminary analysis, visualization, and data storage. IPSO was primarily designed as a decision-support system, with emphasis on value-driven work flows for producing assets. Experts from several fields are required in order to pull together a successful solution.

The business justification of the IPSO system is dependent on the production phase of the field, where different optimization opportunities exist. Across these diverse assets, there is an inherent risk of customizing the architecture, approach, and tools to such an extent that scalability and extensibility are threatened. Such customized solutions slow down the adoption of good features from one project to others. Therefore, a conscious attempt was made from inception to develop IPSO work flows with a common denominator that could be configured for different business needs across a company’s portfolio.

The IPSO system was deployed on line more than 2.5 years ago for a single asset and was later extended to all deepwater assets. Over this period of time, a number of multidisciplinary work flows were added on the basis of the foundational principles detailed in the complete paper.

The following six key tenets were used as guiding principles in developing IPSO work flows:

Business value

Effective planning

Stakeholder support

Involvement of a champion

Sustainability

Scalability