Around a hundred attended the inaugural Energy Exchange Smart field summit held earlier this year in Houston. John Argo described HighMount E&P’s data management and automation strategies to optimize operations at its key Sonora asset. Argo described Sonora as a ‘gas factory’ with its 6,000 wells and one of the largest deployments of electronic flow meters in the world. A high bandwidth wireless Scada network connects these to the office.
HighMount has replaced its legacy Excel analytics with Spotfire-based tools for production surveillance and analysis. These are used to target underperforming wells for intervention, prioritizing high potential wells currently producing say, under half of their 120 day average.
Information is presented to stakeholders along with the economics and estimated return on investment of the intervention. Historical data is leveraged in a well failure analyzer that tracks failures back to 2006. More historical data has allowed HighMount to optimize its routing. This was previously designed to minimize drive time between locations. Now routing includes a weighting for individual opportunities based on well type and characteristics. Rout optimization and increased automation has significantly reduced manpower requirements and redirected efforts to higher potential horizontal oil wells. Overall the initiative has resulted in around $2 million in annual savings along with around $5 million worth of increased production.
Greg Casey presented the Texas energy network (TEN), an LTE network dedicated to oil field connectivity. TEN provides internet connectivity thanks to a secure ‘carrier class’ 4G network, an oil and gas focus and specialized customer equipment. TEN promises rapid deployment of mobile field offices on drilling rigs and transmission of telemetry data to the office. An ‘off-net’ function provides connectivity with sites outside of the TEN coverage area. TEN operates in the Texas’ Permian basin, Eagle ford and panhandle. Clients include Shell, Devon, Apache, Anadarko and Chesapeake. More from TEN. The Energy Exchange is planning a second edition of the Summit in January 2015.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.