Smart Production Surveillance: Production Monitoring and Optimization Using Integrated Digital Oil Field

Abstract

Abstract The change in global oil price has led Oil producing companies to chase each and every barrel of oil either through optimizing their production or through minimizing the production losses pertaining to various reasons. The Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) has a vision to increase its production to 4 MMBOPD by year 2030. To fulfill this vision KOC has designed a Digital Oil Field system which is unique in world in various aspects. This Digital Oil Field is designed to achieve two main objectives, first objective is to minimize the oil production losses associated with downtime and second objective is to optimize the oil production at network and field level. To achieve its first objective KOC designed various workflows to chase the losses and identify its root cause. Once the root cause is identified the issue are fixed in minimum possible time. The workflows designed to achieve this objective were all combined under one main workflow Smart Production Surveillance (SPS). The Smart Production Surveillance comprises of various sub-workflows taking care of various elements which affect or may affect the production. The idea behind the SPS design was to capture the main reasons for production losses, report them as quickly as possible resolve the issue in time and resume the production back to normal. Also as a proactive active approach where prediction of issue is done through alarms and warnings system. For this purpose smart alarms are designed based on experience in Oil Field. These alarms help analyze the issues at well level and pin points the major issues. The objective of the Digital Oil Field system is to improve the oil production by optimization. This objective was met by designing an extensive surface network model comprises of seven gathering centers for seven fields. To run this network model around twelve hundred well models were prepared which acts as an engine for optimization calculations.