Field of the Future: Vision to Reality
Authors: Denney Dennis 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by Technology Editor Dennis Denney, contains highlights of paper SPE 99777, "Field of the Future: Making BP's Vision a Reality," by C. Reddick, SPE, BP, prepared for the 2006 SPE Intelligent Energy Conference and Exhibition, Amsterdam, 11–13 April.

Rapid changes in digital technology are revolutionizing how data are acquired and processed and how the quality and efficiency of decision making are improved. By use of digital technologies, both new and existing, BP aspires to operate its assets at the technical limit of efficiency, recovery, and cost. The company implemented a program called Field of the Future (FOTF). This program covers development and deployment of technology and business-process solutions to most aspects of oil- and gasfield operations—from reservoir to export, in both mature and new fields, onshore as well as offshore.

Program Origin

Internal and External Environment. Rapid advances in digital technology offer the oil industry significant opportunities to address challenges of improving recoveries from existing and new fields, of improving operating efficiency in the face of unfavorable demographics, and of developing new fields in difficult and remote geographies.

Technologies to acquire and transmit data in real time or near real time have been available for several years. However, the oil industry has, with some exceptions, been slow to adopt these technologies for large-scale deployment. Take-up is improving as tools are made available to post-process data, as the industry begins to appreciate the degree of organizational change needed to exploit these technologies, and as the appropriate targeting of these technologies becomes clearer.

First Steps in a Real-Time Revolution. The subject program was established in 2003 with an initial focus on engagement and deployment, the objective being to deploy core technologies in a limited number of assets to establish operating history, to re-affirm the prize, and to build a technical and architectural foundation for subsequent bigger moves.

Early results show numerous examples of production increases through, for example, improved sand management, well management, reservoir imaging, onshore/offshore collaboration, and remote-equipment monitoring. Reserves increases have resulted from the application of streamlined reservoir-performance prediction.

Technology Development and Deployment

Remote performance management includes technologies for well/reservoir and facilities monitoring. This activity develops and applies new tools for managing and post-processing real-time data. Surveillance methods, such as life-of-field seismic, to improved reservoir imaging and downhole flow technologies to improve conformance in water-floods are being developed.

Optimization challenges include new technology to facilitate reservoir optimization by coupling real-time data flows to top-down reservoir-modeling technology and by extending the capability of the tool kit for rapid evaluation of reservoir-management options at all time scales.

Wells- and Facilities-Data Processing. The BP Integrated Subsurface-Information System (ISIS) addresses the technology and processes required to move well data from the point of acquisition through to decision makers, thereby enabling production decisions and implementation of relevant actions. ISIS allows users to access and view surveillance data in real time. It cleans and conditions data, then alerts users to changes in the well: a proactive approach to reservoir-performance management. Fig. 1 shows how onshore users can observe up-to-the-minute offshore data.