Intelligent Digital Oil and Gas Fields: Concepts, Collaboration, and Right-Time Decisions

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Chapter One

Introduction to Digital Oil and Gas Field Systems

Abstract

World energy demand will grow from about 550 QBTU in 2012 to 850 QBTU in 2040 according to 2016 projections from the International Energy Agency (IEA). Although renewable energy sources will grow by a large percentage, petroleum-based liquids (oil) and natural gas will continue to be the largest contributors to energy utilization by the world's population, representing about 55% of the total in 2040. As any current oil and gas production naturally declines, the continued growth of petroleum fuels will be made possible only by forward leaps in technology in finding, drilling, and producing those resources more efficiently and economically. One of the great stories in oil and gas production is the industry's implementation of new digital technologies that increase production for less unit cost. This revolution of the digital oil field is the subject of this book.

Keywords

Digital oil field; Data streaming; Collaboration; Workflows; Visualization

Contents

1.1 What is a Digital Oil and Gas Field?

1.2 DOF Key Technologies

1.3 The Evolution of DOF

1.4 DOF Operational Levels and Layers

1.5 Main Components of the DOF

1.5.1 Instrumentation, Remote Sensing, and Telemetry of Real-Time Processes

1.5.2 Data Management and Data Transmission

1.5.3 Workflow Automation

1.5.4 User Interfaces and Visualization

1.5.5 Collaboration and People Organization

1.6 The Value of a DOF Implementation

1.6.1 Industry Challenges

1.6.2 How DOF Systems Address Challenges and Add Value

1.6.3 DOF Benchmarks Across the World

1.7 Financial Potential of a DOF Implementation

1.7.1 Field Description Example

1.7.2 Cost Estimates

1.7.3 Economic Parameters

1.8 Tables Summarizing Major DOF Projects

References

Further Reading

World energy demand is expected grow from about 550 quadrillion (Q) BTU in 2012 to 850 QBTU in 2040 according to 2016 projections from the International Energy Agency (IEA). As can be seen from Fig. 1.1, although renewables will grow by a large percentage, petroleum-based liquids (oil) and natural gas will continue to be the largest contributors to energy utilization by the world's population, representing about 55% of the total. Since any current oil and gas production naturally declines, the continued growth of petroleum fuels will be made possible only by leaps forward in technology in finding, drilling, and producing those resources more efficiently and economically. One of the great stories in oil and gas production is the industry's implementation of new digital technologies that increase production for less unit cost. This revolution of the digital oil field (DOF) is the subject of this book.

Fig. 1.1 World energy consumption by energy type [International Energy Outlook 2016, Report Number: DOE/EIA-0484(2016). Projection of 46% increase over base 2012].

An oil or gas production field is a value chain of a well drilled into a subterranean rock formation from which oil or gas flows to perforations in the well, and then up the well through various chokes and valves to surface pipelines and treatment facilities and ultimately to a sales terminal or tank. Fig. 1.2A is an offshore complex of wellheads and production facilities, and Fig. 1.2B illustrates a complex of pipes from an offshore complex to wellheads on a sea floor, which connect to wells drilled miles under the seafloor to an oil reservoir. Fig. 1.2C illustrates wellheads on an onshore complex which uses pumps to lift the oil. For each of these situations, there are numerous measurements that enable the operations and production personnel to monitor and improve the production (Fig. 1.2D). These measurements include pressures, temperatures, flow rates, power, vibration, and many more to be discussed in this book. DOF is the application of state-of-the-art technology for sensors, data communication, data analytics, collaboration, and decision making, throughout the value chain of completions, wells, pumps, pipes, chokes, compressors, treatment facilities, etc. to increase production at lower cost.

Fig. 1.2 (A) Offshore oil production platform, (B) subsea well production template, (C) onshore production from artificial lifted wells, and (D) operations center.

This book leads through the journey of how DOF came to be, the state of DOF today, best practices that can be employed in your own professional work—whether management, operations, or production—and a view of what will be possible in the near future. This chapter provides an introduction to DOF and the subsequent topics to be covered.

1.1 What is a Digital Oil and Gas Field?

When many people first hear the term digital oil field they visualize things such as computer displays where you can drag-and-drop digital objects and push buttons to monitor and automate the equipment used in oil and gas field operations. This common vision most definitely describes the interface for a DOF system. But behind the crystal screens are many sensors, cables, circuits, electronic switches, logic algorithms, and computers, which are integrated with the specialized instrumentation and equipment—below ground and on the surface—required to run oil and gas fields. This sophisticated collection of technology is further integrated with processes and people into a single system that allows people to interface with the computer technology to optimize the operations of oil and gas fields. It is this collection of technology, processes, and people into an intelligent system that we refer to as the DOF.

DOF systems are commonly known for the promise of delivering the right data, to the right people, at the right time for effective asset decision making that supports a company's objectives in terms of maximizing hydrocarbon recovery and improving operational efficiency. Several common definitions from the literature include the ones listed below:

• "Digital oil field is an umbrella term for technology-centric solutions that allow companies to leverage limited resources. For instance, such technology can help employees to more quickly and accurately analyze the growing volumes of data generated by increasingly sophisticated engineering technologies (Steinhubl et al., 2008)."

• Saputelli et al. (2013) have defined DOF as the orchestration of disciplines, data, engineering applications, and workflow integration tools supported by digital automation, which may involve field instrumentation, telemetry, automation, data management, integrated production models, workflow automation, visualization, collaboration environments, and predictive analytics.

• A digital oil field is defined by how a petroleum business deploys its technology, people, and processes to support optimizing hydrocarbon production, improving operational safety, protecting the environment, maximizing, and discovering reserves in addition to maintaining a competitive edge. (istore https://www.istore.com/).

We define a digital oil field implementation as a technology system that integrates high-volume data acquisition and transmission in real time for using data in operations centers, distributed computer systems, and mobile technologies. From these destinations, data are reproduced in virtual models and visualized in a cross-discipline collaborative environment by automated workflows, machine-to-machine communication, intelligent agents, and predictive analytic systems. An integrated DOF approach enables a company to maintain its oil and gas operations at optimal and safe operating conditions and ultimately maximize financial potential with minimum human intervention.

Fig. 1.3 depicts the most important elements of a DOF system.

Fig. 1.3 Main description of a DOF system, showing the value chain process from data acquisition, transmission, recollection, data processing, virtual models and workflows, collaboration, visualization and model prediction, and ultimately an action plan with different control modes.

1.2 DOF Key Technologies

Many in the industry would argue that DOF began in the early 1980s with the introduction of SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems in oil and gas production. Those first programs were analog systems with charts that were manually read and interpreted by people. The term DOF is more appropriately associated with introduction of digital sensors, data communication, and computation the mid-1990s, which was followed by an evolution of data and computation in the 2000s. In the mid-2010s, we argue that DOF is in adolescence, with growing big data technologies, increasing automation and intelligence being applied, introduction of collaboration decision centers, and emphasis on work processes.

But a golden era of DOF—with sensors on all relevant equipment mobility of applications, intelligence in automation, and automated optimization of production and field management in real time—is on the horizon in the coming years and decades. We can say with confidence that the coming decade will introduce exciting new advancements. Let us take a look at some of the key technologies that were crucial to getting us this far and will be crucial to achieving this golden age of DOF systems.

What we now know as the Internet began through a partnership between the military, universities, and private corporations known as the ARPANET (Isaacson, 2014). Isaacson (2014) provides a history of the full development. The government-sponsored ARAPNET of the early 1960s eventually enabled multiple computer connections using packet switching and distributed network hubs. ARAPNET went from strictly government, to a network of academic institutions in late 1960s, to a commercial enterprise and a standard protocol (IP/TCP) in the mid-1970s. By the late 1980s the Internet began connecting the world and, with standard Internet protocols (IP), enabled DOF systems to connect sensors throughout the oil and gas value chain to centralized, distributed, and mobile computers.

At the start of the new millennium, more than one-third of the total global population used mobile phones transmitting an astronomical record of 180 exabytes in data such as text, pictures/videos (low resolution), and audio. In 2007, smartphones (iOS and Android) were launched, officially ending the analog era, and open many windows into cyberspace and hand-held portable devices (not a desktop computer).

In the last 10 years, the era of cloud computing—where data are stored in a repository data center to maintain structure, organize, and process and are accessed through public or private networks—has become endemic. Today, the common expression for the immense data size with exponential expansion is big data, a reference to the fact that massive volumes of digital data are not only stored but beyond that the data represent interconnected sources and the data are actually analyzed (by machine learning, neural networks, and process statistics) in real time to enable a multitude of business decisions and transactions. These systems rely on sharing of resources to achieve data coherence and economy of scale.

With a global network and massive amounts of data available, both consumers and businesses want access to all of that with more than just a hand-held device. The Internet of Things (IoT) (Fig. 1.4) is the term used to describe connecting a series of devices integrated with electronic, software, and sensors to the Internet to allow sensing and controlling remotely any object such as home alarm, doors, heating and cooling system, cars, etc. In 2015, Cisco announced that more than 99% of total objects in the physical world are still not connected to the Internet (Evans, 2012). They predict that by 2020, 37 billion smart things will be connected to the Internet. A Wall Street Journal article (Kessler, 2015) described how ever-smaller technology will have revolutionary new applications such as releasing sensors into blood streams to detect disease, sensors on glasses projecting directly to the eye's retina, 3D printing of equipment, construction sites customized in real time, and having thousands of sensors in oil wells miles below the ground.

Fig. 1.4 The Internet of Things (IoT) describes the trend to network all devices for consumers and industry. By 2020 experts expect more than 37 million smart things to be connected to the Internet.

Sensors in oil and gas wells, pipelines, processing equipment, and compressors are becoming much less expensive for the hardware, data transmission, communication, and their deployment compared with systems just a few years ago. Data acquisition that used to require expensive instruments, terminals and panels, communication lines, and slow transmission can now be done for a fraction of price, equipment footprint, and data limits. Thus technology advancements were key to enabling the DOF a reality, as you will see in the following chapters.

1.3 The Evolution of DOF

Beginning in the mid-1990s a series of key projects defines the evolution of DOF systems. This section introduces these projects and their respective highlights with regard to the oil and gas operations that DOF technologies have been applied to. Tables 1.1–1.9 in Section 1.8 summarize each of these projects including the value reported by the operator (which is discussed in this section).

Table 1.1

DOF Industry Benchmarks for Project: Statoil, Integrated Operation Offshore Real-Time Operations Center (1996) Norway, North Sea, for Fields: Various Fields in the North Sea (Offshore)

Table 1.2

DOF Industry Benchmarks for Project: Shell E&P, Smart Fields (1998), for Fields: Mark I Nelson Field, North Sea and Worldwide: US, West Africa, Europe/Russia, Middle East, Asia Pacific

Table 1.3

DOF Industry Benchmarks for Project: BP, Field of the Future (2000), for Locations: North Sea (UK Sector), Shelf (Norway Sector), Angola (Offshore), Kurdistan, Indonesia (Offshore), Trinidad and Tobago, Gulf of Mexico

Table 1.4

DOF Industry Benchmarks for Project: Chevron, i-field (2005), for Locations: Nigeria (Agbami Field and Others), US (Permian Basin), North Sea (Offshore), Australia (offshore), Canada, Angola