Abstract This paper describes the capability of an oil well surveillance system to perform real time individual well surveillance with minimum costs and modifications to the existing plant. The paper gives an overview of as to a well surveillance system installed at a gathering station can reduce wells downtime and minimize oil production loss.
It also describes the concepts and elements used to integrate a well surveillance system with the existing wells and the hardware designed for the trial. The goal of the trial was to have simple and expandable well surveillance system. While concluding, the overall performance of the system during the trial phase is presented.
Background During the last three years, increased number of wells ceased to flow in one of ADCO's major field. These non-producing wells would only be detected when field operators routinely visit the non-producing well site. The same wellsite is visited every 2–7 days in order to avoid the loss in production.
With the increased demand of oil coupled with rising oil prices, reducing the downtime of wells and maintaining uninterrupted oil production became essential. Field Operations and Management realized the well surveillance was a promising solution to this issue. Consequently, ADCO decided to start a well surveillance trial on selected wells in Field-1 using a well surveillance system developed by one of its Shareholders.
Field overview The trial was implemented in one of ADCO's highest producing fields (Field-1). Oil in this field is produced from different reservoirs. In one of the reservoirs, which is mainly a gas reservoir with no pressure support, there was a need to produce maximum amount of oil in the shortest period of time.
The reservoir experienced a rapid decline in pressure due to increased gas production, which in turn resulted in short production life and operational difficulties. To maximize oil recovery from this reservoir, continuous production is essential as any loss in production may not be recoverable. The need for well surveillance system was recognized and one of ADCO Shareholders was approached to use its well surveillance system initially as pilot on 15 wells. The objective of the trial was to design and implement a real-time expandable well surveillance system that could monitor and detect any abnormal well behavior or of a well trip. The agreement was made with the Shareholder to carry out a 180 day trial of its Flowmonitor system.
Oil produced in this field is routed from wells to a gathering station through flow lines where production from a group of wells is gathered at the manifold and is transferred through a transfer line to a central processing station as shown in the diagram below.