Standardize/Simplify Water Flood Pattern Reviews

Abstract

Water flood WF accounts for 40% of Petroleum Development Oman PDO's oil production and volumes. A proper WF management is a key to realize that. This project aims to standardize and simplify WF performance review process, which is very important part of WF management. The current condition of WF performance review vary from field to another in term of frequency of conducting the reviews i.e, once a year, quarterly which resulted in missing the opportunities to improve the WF performance on the right time. Different in house tools and databases are used to prepare the technical materials for the review meeting. As a result, different fields have different way of presenting the technical materials to the reviewers across the company, so no standard pattern review template available and multiple sources for data are used. The field petroleum engineer takes up to 4 hours to prepare the technical material for one pattern review and usually senior or high skills PE requires generating different type of plots. When the Pattern review conducted almost 4 hours for the individual petroleum engineers spent during one pattern review. The proposed counter measures for this project were to replace the review frequency to exception or requirement base to ensure no missed opportunities. As well as standardizing the technical materials for WF pattern review using a single tool/source. The standard template has to fit all patterns in a field. It has to be accessible, with good visualization, and secured storage A Successful pilot run in one of the water flood fields in North Oman with 30+ WF patterns and has demonstrated the following results; standard review template developed within one source data platform. The pattern review was conducted on exceptional based which was a proactive approach. The PE team managed to generate extra optimization opportunities which resulted in proven an increased in oil production of +30 m3/d from 5 patterns. PE saved 3.5 hours/ pattern in preparation. The reviewers appreciated the improvement of quality of the technical materials, which create direct focus on issues identified based on exception. All the technical material were easy to generate by any less experience engineers. To maintain sustainability of the achieved improvements, some lean tools have been used. These tools are summarized in the following points; Standard operating procedures (SOP); two SOPs were generated, one to set up the tool and the other to do the review.Visual management (VM); was also generated to keep track the pattern review and ensure healthy WFM and.Leader Standard Work (LSW); it was completed to ensure sustainability through leader ship support.