Page 386 - Intelligent Digital Oil And Gas Fields

The Future Digital Oil Field 325

and remote operations,” Lenzsch predicts. He also referred to how Total just
put a robot on a topside in the North Sea—automatically doing what many
people were doing before. Lenzsch also indicated that breakthroughs in
hardware are leading to 10 greater storage every 3 years—end-memory
flash solid state is now terabytes and will be many TB in the near future. Solid
state is replacing discs for fast data retrieval and backup, and analytics will be
running from a “mother ship” hub that will communicate with multiple
devices and will feed models to interacting “edge” sensors.
From the viewpoint of Mohammad Askar of the Advanced Research
Center (EXPEC ARC) at Saudi Aramco, the future of O&G operations
is through a fully automated self-learning and auto-optimizing system using
a variety of sensors, remote sensing devices, and a wildly creative commu-
nicative network. Imagine a network of sensors distributed intelligently
everywhere in the field, above and underground, around and far from the
wellbore, while drilling and post-flowing the wells, during operation, etc.
Included with these sensors are another line of remote-sensing devices that
sense far in advance (examples include water encroachment before it hap-
pens, loss circulation, and all sorts of other operational issues that might
arise). Such information (or big data) is acquired in real time, fed to a storage
system (cloud drive) that is linked to a high-performance computing system.
The simulator will run thousands of realizations in real time, and the results
are sent to a smart, self-deciding system, loaded with specific operational sce-
narios to instruct, for example, choke valves (to control which well contrib-
utes to production while keeping water cut low, etc.) and downhole flow
control valves (to control or shut down laterals that are either producing
too much water or about to) through remote sensing.
The future of sensors is very bright also in the area of production surveil-
lance systems. According to ARC, in Saudi Aramco, one goal is to put the
whole field under continuous and real-time deep surveillance, in the most
efficient and cost-effective way, through such enabling technologies. This
means more data points of different types at various locations, at the surface
and downhole. It is only controllable and changeable if one can measure it
better in real time. Imagine if one can see what is going on for a whole field
or section of the field all at once and in real time!
The new generation of sensors can be enabled by new generations of
microprocessor chips. Mims (2017a,b,c) reports on companies like Apple,
Nvidia, Intel, and others that are “breaking Moore’s Law” with task-specific
chips. They move software and applications from the CPU and build the
calculations into the chips so that the work can be done many times faster