Digital Wellhead Integrated System for Production Management

Abstract

The oil and gas industry is lagging behind many industries in the adoption of technology and digital transformation. Our industry must transform at speed and scale to reap the available benefits of such technologies. Managing well integrity through personnel physical presence at the wellsite to take recordings increases the time to react to issues, the time to collect data, and the time to implement actions, and the high field trip rates introduce an increased risk to employees. A digital wellhead integrated system (DWIS) provides information on wellhead parameters from smart instrumentation and achieves operational intelligence via edge computing. This solution improves the response time between production data and field actions to optimize and improve operational performance following workflow parameters. DWIS provides real-time monitoring, data collection, and management of well conditions, which minimizes the effects of human interactions, while providing consistent information that can be used for future health maintenance activities thus mitigating the risk of unexpected events. Cost efficient remote monitoring and control of well activities prolongs the life of the well and promotes savings. The DWIS has been deployed and successfully tested in North America, South America, and the Middle East. A single DWIS implemented with a client resulted in production gains of 400,000 bbl./yr. and reduced 10,000 miles of driving—reducing the carbon footprint in a harsh environment. By providing human intelligence at the wellsite through edge computing and smart instrumentation, data can be generated, and actions taken to reduce expensive unplanned maintenance, offline outages, resource-intensive costs, and carbon footprint. Furthermore, this infrastructure at the wellsite enables ideas for new workflow implementation such as site monitoring via computer vision and more elaborate production and optimization workflows, creating a truly intelligent asset. DWIS maintain well integrity and provide continuous monitoring to optimize oil and gas production. This DWIS supports well integrity maintenance strategies providing real-time control and well optimization enabled by smart instrumentation, surveillance systems, and intelligent workflows powered by artificial intelligence/machine learning algorithms executed at the edge and, in some instances, at the cloud level.