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Chevron - managing Southern California fields

Friday, August 31, 2012

Chevron has 17,000 wells in Southern California, with an average production of just 10 barrels of oil per day, said Steve Cassidy, Manager, Applied Reservoir Management, Chevron, speaking in the Intelligent Energy conference plenary session.

However by reducing the costs of managing the wells it has become one of the most profitable business units in the company,

Production is assisted with steam injection. Most wells get intervention once a year.

To improve its management of the field, Chevron has invested heavily in instrumentation for the wells to gather data, and also puts together plans about how much it would like each injection well to inject.

It also wants to get a better understanding of the subsurface, and in particular which injection wells are the most critical.

It wants a solution to be 'workflow driven' - following a plan - rather than technology driven (geared around trying out different technology).

This includes 'management by exception' tools, which mean that management only have to pay attention to weaker areas of the field.

It also uses sophisticated scheduling technology, including GPS and mobile computers, for its field crews, to make sure they are as efficient as possible.

It also has a range of analytical tools for reservoir management.

Chevron would like more predictable analytics, to try to work out what is going to go wrong before it actually does, he said.

Managing a field 'doesn't have to be people in a room looking at big screens,' he said.

Mr Cassidy says that 'key performance indicators' are proving very difficult to use to assess value, but the six sigma techniques work much better.

Case based reasoning tools provide a 'definite opportunity,' he said, where people can stop making the same mistakes.

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» Chevron

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