Improved Operational Excellence in Oil and Gas Production Management Through New Well Management System
Authors: Shekaili M. , Balushi I. , Kumar N. , Marin E. 
Published: October 2023

Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) has been managing well operation and optimization using Well Management System (WMS) integrated with real time digital twins since last 10 years. Increasing operational requirements, demand of better user experience and security concerns because legacy WMS reaching its end-of-life steered management to upgrade WMS to NextGen system. The scope was to upgrade WMS in 9 assets of PDO and 2 third party operators’ assets while ensuring smooth transition from legacy system.

NextGen WMS is the enabler for integrating industry 4.0 technologies in daily well operation management. Therefore, a new improved architecture was built to cater for future requirements and Cybersecurity assessment was performed. Legacy WMS customizations, integrations, and additional functionalities were migrated to Next Generation (NextGen) WMS and tested properly to have no impact on daily operations and optimization activities. Change management plan was prepared and executed for each asset in a period of 8 months to upgrade WMS.

A continuous training on upgraded WMS was conducted before go-live and both WMS were kept running in parallel to avoid system Downtime and provide smooth transition to users with more confidence.

The WMS migration project is completed after conducting successful change management across all PDO assets and with careful analysis it was concluded that there was huge improvement in PDO's operational excellence, health & safety, cybersecurity and reducing carbon footprint post implementation. The overall yearly benefits are estimated around multi-million USD from well optimization, time saving, enhanced operational efficiency and well automation, which are contributed from following improvements: 30% increase in Personnel efficiency with 103% more users compared to legacy WMS resulted in improving Wells’ KPI.3% and 5.6% net oil gain from ESP and PCP wells production respectively from CAPEX free optimization.200+ Man days/year additional time saving for operation team in controlling wells remotely.25% further reduction in HSE exposure because of less driving to well sites because of remote control capability.

The web-based NextGen WMS is more secure, faster, intuitive and user friendly compared to legacy system and promises future ready modules of end-to-end production modeling, artificial intelligence based well autonomous control, productized predictive analytics and business intelligence. The added benefits of live operating envelopes (OE), locked in potential (LIP), intelligent exception-based-surveillance (EBS) and optimization opportunities have improved OE assurance and compliance for whole PDO.

The implementation of new technologies has supported in overcoming operational challenges and efficiently managing the oil and gas operation. The NextGen WMS has introduced industry standard multi factor authentication to validate user across domains from business to process control to securely start and stop wells and update their setpoint remotely through a web-based application functioning in business domain.