A Holistic Approach to Defining Well Operating Envelopes

Abstract

Abstract Well performance management is a critical aspect of production system optimisation in an oil and gas field. Accurately defining the well operating envelope will not only ensure asset integrity, but will also ensure realistic production performance expectations (forecasts) from available well resource. This paper discusses an approach to defining well operating envelopes that incorporates the technical limits and constraints of the various components of the producing well (i.e. reservoirs, sand face completions, tubing erosion and surface production facility, etc.). The methodology employs a visualization tool to graphically represent the operating envelope for the wells based on these constraints. This approach has been implemented in several fields and wells in Shell Nigeria with varying completion types and field-wide constraints. It has also been proven to be flexible enough to accommodate the possible variations between well types and field peculiarities. The case study of five fields in SPDC Swamp West Asset presented in this paper will demonstrate this flexibility. Some of the benefits realized include improved reservoir management and water cut control. Furthermore, the visualization tool has been used to carry out exception based well surveillance that has proven to improve our response time to well deviations for better deferment management.