Page 360 - Intelligent Digital Oil And Gas Fields

Transitioning to Effective DOF Enabled by Collaboration and Management of Change 303

With DOF field surveillance and management by exception and priority,
the personnel can focus on the wells that require the most attention and
those that are impacting the production the most (Fig. 8.6). Alerts are ratio-
nalized and then ranked by value of intervention (i.e., the lost production),
taking into account intervention and workover costs. The alert and alarm
dashboard(s) are visible on a mobile device so that the appropriate (based
on skill and proximity) personnel can be directed to the most valuable wells,
in a logical order and depending on the severity of the situation. Any inter-
vention activity can be logged directly into a production or well database
from the mobile device. The location of the vehicle is tracked via GPS into
a GIS map visible to the operators and logged into a data base. Analytics can
be performed on the travel time, history, and time at well locations for each
activity.
Companies get significant value from transition to a DOF-assisted
mobile work process, including the following:
• Reduces well downtime. In the first 2 months, one field experienced an
almost 30% improvement.
• Reduces operator interaction with lower value wells and increase time
on higher potential wells.
• Increases safety through significant reduction in vehicle miles and
on-road time (often in rural, hazardous areas), one business unit experi-
enced almost 25% decrease in “vehicle miles-road time” when
transitioning to a “by-exception” approach.
• Enables more proactive well maintenance decisions.
• Enables more productivity for operations center staff who can focus on
the most important alerts.

8.2.4 Examples: Collaboration and Mobility in Practice

Permian Basin artificial lift. A field in the Permian Basin was experiencing
unacceptable downtime and intervention costs for their vertical wells on
rod pumps. The wells had pump controllers and real-time data (dynacard,
strokes per minute, power diagnostics, etc.) were stored on a contractor’s
server, but the data was not available online within the company. Generally,
data from previous day’s event reports (e.g., gyro runs, chemical treatments,
tubing and rod scan inspections, etc.) were on separate data folders and phys-
ical reports. Each morning the production engineers would manually down-
load all the data onto their desktops and then port the data into spreadsheets
so they could analyze report data to prepare for the 8a.m. “pull meeting.”