Speaking at the SPE/Reed Exhibitions Intelligent Energy event earlier this year, Bill Taylor described Chevron’s hugely successful integrated production systems optimization program (IPSO) at its West Texas McElroy Field, discovered in 1926. Chevron currently drills some 50 wells per year and undertakes hundreds of workovers involving constant pattern realignment and moving huge quantities of fluid around.
Chevron’s i-Field specialists took a look at the project and determined that the automation systems and data were all in place, all that was needed was a workflow analysis—notably to identify areas where automation was feasible and to flag wells which required attention.
A collaboration center was installed and tools developed as follows. An ‘injection management exception management’ (IMET) tool shows above or below target injection. A well event surveillance tool (WEST) does exception reporting and provides daily alerts for producers and injectors. PEST—the ‘pattern event surveillance tool’ checks performance against established logic rules and displays alerts on ESRI ArcGIS via the PetroWeb gateway and Harvard Graphics.
The system helped identify a promising shallow zone that was drilled up and produced an incremental 1500 bopd. In the Q&A, Taylor revealed that the economics of such extra production meant that there was never any question about funding the ISPO/i-Field projects.
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