Field Integrated Operating Center: A Collaborative Environment Enabling Daily Operational Support and Maximizing Oil Production

Tengizchevroil (TCO) is the largest operator in Kazakhstan developing two of the world’s deepest supergiant oilfields - Tengiz and Korolev. The concept of an Integrated Operations Center (IOC) has been developed and implemented over the last few years in TCO. The TCO IOC approach has been established in both Plants and Field Operations to perform rigorous planning of short and long-term activities, improve communication between operational teams (Field Operations, Plant Operations, Reservoir Management Group, Process Engineering Team, Projects Team, etc.) and increase production efficiency at the Field and Plant level. Two key objectives of the IOC are to utilize an Integrated Asset Management approach to ensure field deliverability is available to maintain plant production demands throughout the year, as well as to utilize planned/unplanned facility downtime to execute field facility maintenance and project scope, reservoir surveillance jobs, etc. The IOC collaborative environment allowed TCO to improve production efficiency in the field and at the Plant by establishing a clear communication bridge between multi-discipline groups, and implementing a "conflict resolution" process, which enabled all relevant groups to perform integrated planning. The overall IOC process has added more than 15,000 bbls of daily production. One of the key components to the success of the Integrated Asset Management approach was to embed a production engineer in the IOC to ensure field work scope decisions and scheduling are based on short and long-term production deliverability. This paper outlines how a real-time system can be used for production planning optimization, resource allocation and integrated plan development. The paper includes a discussion of how the Integrated Asset Management approach can be utilized in an operation center to address some of the challenges associated with production planning in field operations.