The fun thing about technology is that it consistently defeats the best efforts of the marketing department. With the marketing spotlight on Petrel it was therefore natural that our star of the show award should go to a fiesta of Dos boxes and Fortran number crunching.
World premier
Andy Howell (SIS) and Mark Lochmann (AspenTech) jointly presented the ‘world premier’ of the Avocet Integrated Asset Management (IAM) interface. Today, 90% of production engineering is done in Excel. ‘It’s an art, not a science’. Avocet IAM sets out to inject science into facilities design. Avocet uses a canvas onto which number crunching design and simulation engines can be dragged and dropped.
Brillig
Without more ado, Howell performed a live demo, dragging, dropping and connecting HySys, PipeSim and Eclipse onto the Avocet IAM canvas. Test data from Statoil’s Gullfaks and Brillig fields was used to investigate the commercial logic of a proposed interconnection between the two production facilities.
Tank model
The canvas paradigm allows just about any tool to be used in the computation – including Excel, tank models or production profiles. One key workflow involves updating spreadsheets and tank models from the simulator results. Eclipse and PipeSim results feed HySys for heating/treating and gas flash-off calculations. A time stepper animates graphs of production, water rates and steam used. Eclipse shows wells shutting in as they reach the economic limit.
Digital oilfield
The simulation showed the gas oil ration doubling in 4 years. Can the compressors handle this? Can electric drives cope? Water from the reservoir is up, but water produced by the facility is down. We were confused as to the outcome of the demo. Did Gullfaks get plugged in to Brillig? Could the compressors cope? What does ‘swapping the exchangers mean’? It really didn’t matter. This is it! The digital oilfield in all its splendor. And not a Petrel in sight!
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