Workshop Highlights Value of Reservoir Surveillance

“Creating Value Through Surveillance” was the theme of the SPE Applied Technology Workshop (ATW) on reservoir surveillance held 15–18 November 2006 in Phuket, Thailand. A total of 58 oilfield professionals, representing 32 organizations from 12 different countries, attended the ATW, which focused on the essential place of surveillance in reservoir management and on how to ensure that surveillance delivers quantifiable value that is clearly recognized.

Following opening comments by workshop Cochairperson Gordon Springate (Chevron), keynote speaker Omar Al-Husaini, Acting General Manager, Drilling and Workover, Saudi Aramco, gave an incisive overview of the key surveillance technologies his organization is using to enhance production and recovery in an increasingly stretched global oil market. His comments on technical capability, geosteering technology, smart completions, and real-time field management set the stage for the discussions to come.

A number of key themes developed over the course of the workshop:

The inability to achieve effective use of surveillance information if organizations lack focused plans, people, and processes to manage such data
The need for defined methods to establish the value of surveillance
The effective use of high- and low-tech processes in reservoir surveillance
The importance of managing large volumes of data and integrating them into reservoir management

Reinforcing the importance of point No. 1, the key takeaways for more than half of the participants involved people, systems, and processes.

The value theme was especially developed in Sessions 2 and 3. Session 2 encompassed discussions on the value of the intelligent wellbore (Jim Walker, Baker Hughes), probabilistic approaches to assessing the value of information (John Weber, Murphy), multiple uses of electric-submersible-pump monitoring data (Dan Saenz, Schlumberger), and the value resulting from effective workflows and integrated decision making in a mature waterflood (Rozaida Affendi, ExxonMobil). The subsequent breakout period (Session 3), led by ATW Cochairperson Nick Last (Advanced Well Technologies), enabled participants to put some of those concepts into practice during a group exercise on assessing the value of information.

An effective poster session (Session 5) was put together by the contributors and successfully organized by Robert Pahmiyer (Halliburton). Among the several poster topics were production-logging applications in stacked sand reservoirs and the difficulties of implementing a genuine smart field.

The effective use of fit-for-purpose technologies and data-management and -integration issues, were examined in sessions 4, 6, and 7. Kicking off Session 4, Brian Smart (Daylight Resources Trust) demonstrated the value of early application of simple analytical techniques to routine data. Following this was the presentation of a water-injection-surveillance case study by Mohamad Syukairy Supian (Petronas Carigali), which generated discussion on the importance of questioning and refining initial reservoir-management objectives as surveillance data accumulates. Chawiwan Jiraratchwaro (PTTEP) described how surveillance data from a stacked-sand gas field are used to characterize and manage water production, while Wong Chun Seng (Petronas Carigali) explained how effective surveillance has allowed continuous improvement of acid treatments in a field beset by scaling problems.

In Session 6, Bert Terry (Murphy) emphasized that surveillance data are not just for reservoir management and pointed out the difficulty in designing the systems to gather, distribute, and extract the relevant data. David Johnson (Halliburton) described how distributed-temperature sensing can yield a continuous well production profile, and Antonio Cuauro (Schlumberger) focused on the automation of data analysis by capturing the logic of engineers’ work processes. Thijs Kuiper (Chevron) discussed a data-management system for accessing numerous types of surveillance data in multiple databases through a single interface. He illustrated how such data integration leads to value-adding decisions and to easier demonstration of the value added. Developing on these themes, Kamarul Ariffin Buang (ExxonMobil) led the session 7 breakout on the selection of appropriate technologies.

The subsequent sessions focused on organization, people, and process issues, along with aspects of surveillance design. In Session 8, Smart described effective approaches to demonstrating the value of surveillance automation to management, after which Earl Hickok (Tusk Energy) illustrated how to achieve operational excellence by aligning the organization, adopting technology innovations, and assembling highly skilled teams. Gord Shmyrko (Tecskor) led the group through an integrated field-review process, and Ruurd Bartlema (Chevron) showed a system for streamlining surveillance requests in a complex, multiplatform offshore field.

Session 9 on intelligent solutions included discussions on production logging in horizontal wells and how completion design affects data acquisition (David Chace, Baker Atlas), the importance of chemical dosing and managing it through automated surveillance (Mitch Means, Baker Hughes), the value of data obtained through innovative deployment of hardware such as permanent downhole gauges (Juhari Yang, Petronas Carigali), and an overview of the use of tiltmeters and microseismic data for continuous fieldwide fluid-movement monitoring (Tracy Grills, Pinnacle Technologies).

Session 10 on surveillance design included presentations on making the right data available to the right people at the right time (Greg Hild, Chevron), surveillance design by and for production-optimization teams (Riehdwan Muhammad, Shell), a design for real-time surveillance to maximize recovery in a giant carbonate field (Ali Al-Muallem, Saudi Aramco), the use of multiwell monitoring to maintain well performance (Angga Riksa, Vico Indonesia), and the centrality to surveillance of detecting deviations from expectation and taking prompt corrective action (Barry Dawe, Newfield). In session 11, Hild led a breakout exercise on surveillance design.

Following this, Cochairpersons Last and Springate wrapped up the 3-day program with a summary of the dominant themes of the workshop and the key takeaways from it. The ATW program committee was composed of Buang, Cuauro, Pahmiyer, Smart, Weber, Robert Kerr (Scientific Drilling), Michael Madden (Hess), Nattapon Nampratcha-yakul (Chevron), Nazri Abdul Malek (Petronas Carigali), Farrokh Pebdani (Saudi Aramco), Stephen Sakowski (Baker Oil Tools), and Kanit Sangwongwanich (PTTEP).