Remotely Operated Smart-Well Completions
Authors: Denney Dennis 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by Technology Editor Dennis Denney, contains highlights of paper SPE 112226, "Intelligent Wells to Intelligent Fields: Remotely Operated Smart-Well Completions in Haradh-III," by Ibrahim H. Al-Arnaout, SPE, Saad M. Al-Driweesh, SPE, and Rashad M. Al-Zahrani, SPE, Saudi Aramco, and Zuhed Abdul Rahman, SPE, and Suresh Jacob, SPE, WellDynamics, prepared for the 2008 SPE Intelligent Energy Conference and Exhibition, Amsterdam, 25–27 February. The paper has not been peer reviewed.

Multilateral wells with smart-well completions and permanent monitoring systems were integrated with an advanced supervisory control and data-acquisition (SCADA) system that enables real-time remote monitoring and control of downhole and surface equipment from the control room. The design and installation of the automated system was a multidisciplinary project integrating subject experts and tools from well completions, production engineering, facilities, instrumentation, and communications. The system enables an operator in the control room to operate the downhole valves in all the multilateral smart wells remotely through the SCADA system.

Introduction

The Haradh-III field is in the southernmost part of the Ghawar complex, approximately 100 km west-southwest of Dharan, Saudi Arabia, and has been developed with 32 maximum-reservoir-contact (MRC) multilateral wells, with intelligent completions installed in 28 wells. This arrangement reduces the required well count and achieves higher productivity from each well. Studies showed that developing the Haradh-III field with MRC wells and smart-completion technology would delay water encroachment, improve flood-front conformance and recovery, and reduce water production and operating costs.

The concept of intelligent fields was incorporated into the field design to enable continuous monitoring of key reservoir-performance parameters and real-time data transmission from downhole to the engineers' desktops. The surface infrastructure was designed with the communication and power facilities required to connect all the wells to the field SCADA system. The field communication infrastructure was designed as an open architecture to integrate the intelligent-well controls as an independent subsystem of the field-control system.

System Overview

The Haradh-III-field communications network is a scattered/distributed layout linking all wellsites to the gas/oil separation plant (GOSP). The field-control-sys-tem architecture uses a remote-terminal unit (RTU) at the wellsite connected to a central SCADA application in the GOSP by means of a fiber-optic communications network. In addition to intelligent-completion technology, each well in the field is provided with downhole point-pressure and -temperature sensors and a surface multiphase-flow meter.

The field SCADA application acts as a single interface point for all field control. Data hand-off to the field historian occurs at the GOSP. The application also is the integration point for intelligent-completion systems. Fig. 1 shows the field communications network linking the wellsites to the control-room terminal.