Integrating business and technical workflows helps achieve asset-level production optimization

Flexible production workflow automation is providing significant advantages for automation and enhancement of all production workflows. 

Michael Szatny, Landmark

The pressure on the oil and gas industry to meet growing energy demand-while faced with fewer technical professionals, more complex reservoirs and smaller economic margins-is making it more critical than ever for operators to make quick, accurate and informed field development decisions that efficiently leverage the expertise of seasoned technical professionals.

The industry is looking for information technologies that can extend the reach of technical experts and better ground high-level business decisions in the scientific evaluation of the asset. Flexible workflow automation systems can now take technical production applications at the engineering level and put them in a computing environment where they can be integrated with Business Process Management (BPM) systems to create automated asset-level workflows. In initial implementations, the results have included more efficient production operations, less personnel time required to complete repeatable production tasks, better incorporation of uncertainties into business-level decisions and, most importantly, increased reservoir production.

INTEGRATED WORKFLOWS INCREASE ASSET RETURN

Integrated, asset-level production workflows stand to provide important efficiencies to any operator, but especially to those working in remote offshore locations where it can be difficult to access many of the experts required to perform daily operations. An international oil company managing a deepwater Floating Production, Storage and Offloading vessel (FPSO) provides a key example of the benefits of a production workflow automation environment. It also illustrates the wide range of processes that can be automated.

The company’s FPSO team was on an aggressive deadline for first oil in a greenfield project with a diverse group of cross-disciplinary technologies and applications. Integration of the disparate applications and data into cohesive asset-level workflows was a significant challenge, and it was critical that the considerable data in each existing application and the unique knowledge held by each technical domain be captured.

Flexible workflow automation. In this situation, the FPSO team had three options for creating the complex automated workflows that were necessary to meet the project deadlines and targets: customization, replacement or integration. Customization is a common yet complicated method that requires manual automation of existing technical and business-level applications and data. This is often completed through custom programing code or even spreadsheets. This approach can provide an immediate solution, but is difficult to maintain over time.

The second option was to replace existing stand-alone applications with an all-in-one integrated solution. This involves a single-provider solution that packages all the functionality in a single environment. However, most companies prefer to preserve their significant investment in existing systems and software. And while integrated, the package may not have the capability and flexibility of the previous best-of-breed point software solutions.

The third approach, and the one that yielded success for the FPSO team, was implementing a workflow automation solution that incorporated existing business and technical data and applications into an integrated asset-level production process. In this case, the solution needed to account for a broad and complex mix of workflows common to many field production operations, such as well test validation, well shut-in testing and analysis, well production surveillance and optimization, and production decline analysis.

Most importantly, the workflow automation environment selected by the FPSO team was flexible enough to facilitate the use of best-of-breed tools for both simple and sophisticated processes. In this setting, the asset team was able to create repeatable workflows based on industry and internal best practices, which enabled them to better manage their production operations. In the end, it also allowed the team to stick to its initial timeline and put it on track to increase overall production. While results have yet to be quantified precisely, the results are expected to be in line with Cambridge Energy Research Associates’ expectations for operators implementing digital oilfield initiatives, with production increased by about 4%, the reservoir recovery factor improved by as much as 3%, and costs reduced up to 9%.

Workflows automated by FPSO team. Discussed below are three examples of common and critical production workflows that the FPSO team automated and integrated within business processes to meet its goals.

Well test validation is a very simple process but one that is vital to the successful allocation of production fluids. It is also a task that must be done repeatedly over the life of an asset. These high stakes make it paramount to complete each well test consistently, and made this process a prime candidate for automation. Using the workflow automation environment, the team efficiently cataloged and tracked each of the field’s producing wells to ensure consistent well test results.

Using the workflow automation environment, the team was able to automate many of the simple, yet time-consuming, manual steps of the well test process, Fig. 1. Each time a well test is performed, certain validations, calculations and updates must be made to ensure that asset allocations and production targets remain accurate. By mechanizing these individual tasks, the asset team can reduce the total time required by operations and production engineers for each test. For example, well tests traditionally yield incomplete data. This requires a member of the operations team to review the test and complete missing data points, for example, using laboratory data. At this point, a production engineer must then validate the report against a calibrated well model, updating model parameters as necessary before final approval and submission into the production database of record. The workflow automation environment automates these steps and alerts the asset team only in the event of an anomaly. Using this technology, the FPSO team was able to cut the time required to validate a well test from one day to a mere 15 minutes.

Fig. 1. Automation allows asset teams to mechanize many of the tedious steps of the well test validation to speed cycle times. Click image to enlarge.

Well shut-in tests, used to establish key reservoir parameters, also require downtime that is particularly costly in offshore environments. By automating this production workflow, the FPSO team was able to automatically detect the shut-in, capture the required data and transmit it to pressure transient analysis tools in real time. In turn, this allowed production engineers to call for an accelerated end to shut-in tests when possible to minimize well downtime and reduce project costs.

Tracking of wellhead pressures and flows that needed to be regularly collected and input into the FPSO team’s production database was also automated. This particular automated workflow, based on a rigorous well model, estimated the theoretical flow of each well. This theoretical rate was stored in the production database and could then be visualized against the measured flow on a regular basis. Wells that deviated significantly from this theoretical performance were flagged, and the production engineer was alerted that they required his immediate attention, freeing key personnel to focus attention on areas that added the most value.

Automating these repeatable production workflows also increased the FPSO team’s on- and offshore collaboration, which reduced the need for offshore resources. Onshore experts could easily monitor remote operations and lend their expertise to multiple offshore projects. This yielded benefits in a number of areas, including health, safety, environment and employee welfare.

ACCOUNT FOR UNCERTAINTIES

In addition to the specific benefits achieved by the FPSO team, implementation of a workflow automation environment promises to allow all operators to better account for the uncertainties inherent in production, both in the technical workflows and in higher-level business decisions governed by a company’s BPM system.

For example, any time an operator is forecasting a field’s production, his or her target numbers are based on many reservoir variables. In turn, the critical business-level decisions based on the forecast can turn out to be nothing more than best guesses. By integrating these business-level decisions with technical processes like reservoir modeling to create an integrated, automated workflow, the system can run hundreds or thousands of different models. This leads to better-informed and more accurate decisions.

BETTER-INFORMED DECISIONS

Optimizing production and integrating business and technical tasks into efficient, automated workflows is a hurdle for the industry. Many companies have already implemented BPM systems to automate key approval processes and other high-level workflows. Most also employ a variety of operational workflow systems to mechanize technical processes, but to date, the effort to combine the two has been difficult and accompanied by high tradeoffs.

As shown in the FPSO example above, there is now a way to overcome this challenge by using a flexible production workflow automation environment. These solutions can effectively combine business and technical production processes into cohesive, asset-level workflows. By integrating best-practice applications from these workflows, these environments are providing significant advantages for automation and enhancement of all production workflows and promise to help operators stretch their existing resources and increase production.