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Optimising production with data in native database - from OVS

Thursday, March 6, 2014

One Virtual Source (OVS) of Houston is growing over 30 per cent a year, helping companies to virtually integrate their production data and software applications, automate key technical workflows to enable effective production surveillance and optimization. We interviewed Larry Denver, President.

One of OVS's clients is Mexican state oil company Pemex, where 70% of the state's production runs through OVS. Pemex has seen a sustained 4-5 per cent production increase on one of their major fields after implementing an OVS workflow to help optimise gas lift. This works out to an additional15, 000-20,000 barrels of oil per day.

ConocoPhillips implemented a 'plunger lift optimisation tool' (or PLOT) together with OVS, which it says led to production increases of 5-30 per cent on over 4,500 plunger lifted wells.

Zone Energy of Houston used the system to help manage water flood on a brownfield in East Texas which produces around 10,000 barrels of oil per day. The company acquired the asset and was initially limited to using Microsoft Excel to help manage their field. It developed a system with OVS for managing well test data, production and injection data, checking and inputting downtime, supporting allocations, and making operational and managerial reports.

A system was also developed for ENI Petroleum in Italy in April 2012, for production surveillance on the Val D'Agri field in South of Italy, to monitor well and field performance, follow up on well interventions and do daily monitoring. Users can use the system to access production flow rate data, well head pressure and temperature, bottom hole pressure, results of fluid sampling, static pressure data and flow rate of injected chemicals.

It was installed on ENI's Nikaitchuq field on the North Slope of Alaska, where it is also used for operating and analysing water flood.

The OVS software enables the integration of various data sources and applications well known in the industry, inclusive of data historians (such as OSISOFt PI, Cygnet, and Yokogawa), reservoir software such as Landmark's OpenWorks and Schlumberger's GeoFrame, ERP software such as SAP, simulators such as Olga (flow simulator) and Eclipse (reservoir simulator), PETEX well and facility optimisation software, and well modelling software such as WellFlo and PIPESIM. It has a very tight integration with Microsoft office (Excel, PowerPoint, Word) and support integration with over 30 others common oil & gas software applications.

The company operates in many oil and gas domains, including drilling and maintenance, but it sees production operations and optimisation as the one with the most potential for improvement of asset management.

OVS makes integrations with the various software packages (via their Application Programming Interfaces or APIs). It can do calculations on the data (such as comparing actual expenditure with forecast expenditure), and then provide workflow tools, dashboards and alerts. It can also build tools for people in different positions, from the CEO to field technicians.

OVS has been developing various workflows for different companies for the past 6 years, and now believes it has 75 per cent of the workflows which upstream oil and gas companies might want in its library, so they can be quickly implemented with small tweaks (for example if they were developed with Weatherford's 'WellFlo' well modelling application, but another client is using Schlumberger's PIPESIM).

Linking software packages in this way means that you can have an integrated system, without having an integrated database - which is good because many software tools don't have the possibility to integrate their databases, and if they do, building a central database gets very expensive to maintain. 'I don't think there will ever be a single database for production,' Mr Denver says.

OVS software can be maintained remotely, via virtual private network, where OVS staff can logon to the corporate network remotely, even if the software is not web enabled.

OVS works with a number of third party companies which provide system maintenance, with expertise in special areas such as real time drilling, production optimisation and intelligent field type work. For example it works with a Belgian company called IPCOS to do system implementations with Lukoil in Iraq.

Pemex

For Mexican state company Pemex, it compares actual well test data with predicted data from the PROSPER well optimisation software (by Petroleum Experts Ltd) to check if they match, and if they don't, either the well test is not valid or the PROSPER model needs to be updated. Before OVS, 'PEMEX could spend many weeks to try to optimise each well. Now we do it two times a day,' he says. 'It is about simplifying and automating what had been very manual tasks.'

Pemex claims to have seen a 4-5 per cent production increase after implementing an OVS workflow to help optimise gas lift. This works out at 15,000-20,000 barrels of oil per day.

OVS also performs 'virtual well metering'. This method is applied when well tests are only performed sporadically and back allocations are consequently inaccurate. OVS can monitor the historians to pull daily operational data like tubing head pressure, bottom hole pressure, choke settings, etc. Because OVS manages the PROSPER well models, the models can be run automatically to generate an estimate of daily production. This estimate is often times far more accurate than the allocated data, especially well tests (required by allocation systems) are only taken infrequently.

ConocoPhillips

In Houston, Conoco Phillips worked with OVS to develop a tool called 'Plunger Lift Optimization Tool (PLOT).

4.5 million daily data records are gathered, monitoring rates, pressures and results of mathematical calculations.

'PLOT allows us a nearly real time detailed look at how our plunger lift wells are being operated and how those wells react to changes that are made. Ultimately this should allow us to better optimize the wells (make more production) and recognize sooner when things go wrong (break, wear out, etc.),' says Bill Hearn, Artificial Lift Production Engineer with ConocoPhillips.

'It provides an understanding of what wells are capable of and allows us to optimize them to their true capacity,'

ConocoPhillips in the North Sea is implementing an OVS workflow for optimising gas lift on some of its fields. The optimising process involves taking various readings, running calculations through various software packages and making changes.

Associated Companies
» OVS Group

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