In last month’s Journal we reported from the 2010 Artificial Lift R&D Council meet, notably with a presentation from Weatherford on its WellSavvy ‘digital engineer’ application. This was followed by a presentation from Neil De Guzman on IntelligentAgent Corp.’s (IAC) ‘TellWell’ tool. Like WellSavvy, TellWell leverages periodic data from well tests along with pressure, injection rates and models to monitor gas lift wells, diagnose problems, recommend corrective actions and explain the results. A software ‘agent’ mimics an expert’s train of thought using pattern recognition and case-based reasoning. The system provides ‘visibility’ into the data and into the reasoning behind its recommendations.
After the event, Oil IT Journal asked De Guzman about the relationship between TellWell and WellSavvy. He explained, ‘IAC holds several patents for the application of intelligent agent technology in oil and gas. We have researched this field for several years with support from Baker Hughes, BP, Chevron, Halliburton, Marathon, and Statoil. More recently we shifted from R&D to building applications for the use of agent technology in artificial lift. TellWell is IAC’s gas lift application that uses any of the commercially-available well models such as WinGlu, Prosper and SNAP. Weatherford’s WellSavvy is a version of TellWell customized for use with Weatherford products such as Wellflo and LOWIS.’
Fathi Shnaib (Dubai Petroleum) and co-authors from Smart Zone Solutions and Weatherford’s i-DO team presented on the digital oilfield transformation taking place on Dubai Petroleum’s offshore gas fields. Optimization of the complex, mature asset is currently a ‘highly manual effort’ with a long cycle time. Slow identification of under-performing wells makes it hard to allocate well production and pinpoint losses. Weatherford’s i-DO methodology has been used to automate data acquisition and QC. Well models are tuned with current well test data and update the asset model automatically to allow full-field optimization at any point in time. I-DO provides a full field performance dashboard tracking KPIs such as lost production, reconciliation, back allocation with comparison to theoretical, identifying underperforming wells and upside opportunities. The i-DO server is an Oracle based web server and application engine. This is early days for the system, there are many more future opportunities. The system has now provided reduced downtime, tracking of full field production at a glance and improved workflows enabling faster and better decision making and unity of data available to all.
SPT Group’s Juan Carlos Mantecon showed how simulation is used to optimize well clean-up. Dynamic simulation defines the minimum rate and time required to clean a well along with the best size of test equipment. With offshore drilling unit costs of $600,000 a day, this kind of modeling quickly pays off. More from alrdc.org.
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