Speaking in the ‘Digital Collaboration’ session of the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition*, Tope Adeyemi acknowledged the contributions of Halliburton, Scandpower and Yokogawa to Chevron’s Agbami ‘digital oilfield’ development. The Nigerian supergiant, located 200km offshore Port Harcourt, has recoverable reserves of around a billion barrels produced from a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) facility with two million barrels of storage.
The last year has seen the development of a ‘relevant time’ asset management strategy for the flagship ‘i-Field’ development with its four stacked reservoirs of ‘uncertain’ connectivity. One i-Field application is to mitigate early gas breakthrough by monitoring fluid gradients from multiple zones and across the flanks of the main thrust fault.
Relevant time asset management uses digital oilfield concepts and ‘intelligent’ well completion to optimize recovery. Downhole control valves and instrumentation have created a data ‘tsunami’ with some 200,000 data tags sampled every few seconds. Chevron is taming the tsunami with the phased deployment of an asset decision environment (ADE) for interdisciplinary collaboration between office and field.
Data from applications including Halliburton’s AssetObserver, Yokagawa’s historian and Scandpower’s Topaz is channeled through Chevron’s i-Connect middleware to for ‘integrated, multi disciplinary work processes.’ The i-Connect data integration layer also provides access to maintenance repair and operations data (MRO), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other systems of record. Initially the project provides pressure and flow monitoring allowing for field management by exception.
Adeyemi noted significant safety gains from the i-Field with fewer people on board the FPSO. In the near term this advantage is to be pushed home with increasing automation. The plan is to control the field from the office with a further head count reduction—mirroring a similar drive to automation and remote operations in the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico. IT infrastructure has proved critical to the project’s success and significant effort went into assuring the bandwidth required for production optimization. A 95% uptime was reported at first oil. Data redundancy is assured with a mirrored infrastructure onshore. Future phases of the project will increasingly integrate information stored in Chevron’s AvevaNet database of facilities information—an example of a successful handover of data and information from construction to operations (OITJ, July 2007). More from the 2008 SPE ATCE on pages 6&7 of this issue.
* SPE paper number 11536.
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