Achieving Well-Performance Optimization Through Work-Flow Automation
Authors: Carpenter Chris 
Published: January 2017

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper SPE 173578, “Samarang Integrated Operations: Achieving Well-Performance Monitoring, Surveillance, and Optimization Through Data- and Model-Driven Work- Flow Automation,” by M. Zul Izzi Ahmad and Colinus Lajim Sayung, Petronas, and Muzahidin M. Salim, M. Kasim Som, Lee Hin Wong, Shripad Biniwale, Nur Erziyati, Kenneth Soh, Roland Hermann, Vo Tri Nghia, Lau Chong Ee, and Muhammad Firdaus Hassan, Schlumberger, prepared for the 2015 SPE Digital Energy Conference and Exhibition, The Woodlands, Texas, USA, 3–5 March. The paper has not been peer reviewed.

The Samarang field is located offshore Sabah, Malaysia. The field is undergoing a major redevelopment project with integrated operations (IO). In order to overcome a variety of challenges and to improve field awareness, several work flows were designed and deployed in order to achieve an early milestone of providing realtime well-performance monitoring, surveillance, and optimization. The paper discusses how these work flows were implemented in an integrated way to provide a modern decision-support system for the Samarang field.

Introduction

Samarang is an old oil field and thus exhibits the characteristics of many mature fields, including declining production. It has been in production for more than 35 years from multiple, now aging, platforms with insufficient metering and monitoring processes. Given this situation, well status and uptime is unknown for many days, causing delays in mitigation and rectification of production issues. Most of the instrument measurements have been carried out on an ad hoc basis; various facility readings were measured manually, which subsequently deferred field review, causing loss of production. The main technique implemented for production optimization has been artificial lift, with more than 80% of wells and strings being gas lifted. It was necessary to find a better way to manage this production flow stream efficiently with an improved asset-management strategy.

Solution Overview

For Samarang, the IO solution is designed in such a way that work flows process data into actionable information, improve decision processes by leveraging technology, and equip people with systems and tools enabling enhanced decision support. An IO field creates value through enhanced asset management by focusing on decisions to improve reservoir drainage, production, and operations. As part of Samarang’s overall IO development strategy, the wells and facilities were equipped with the required instrumentation to support approximately 25 work flows.

Oil and gas asset activities and decisions span a range of time scales; therefore, the work flows are divided mainly into three main categories: fast-loop, medium-loop, and slowloop decision cycles. These are then sub divided into seven different subdomain categories covering flow-assurance, well- performance, facilities-monitoring, artificial-lift, production-planning, enhanced-oil- recovery (EOR) - surveillance, and optimization work flows.