Development of a Virtual Flowmeter as an Enhanced Alternative for Field Production Monitoring

Flowrate is a valuable information for the oil and gas industry. High accuracy on flowrate estimation enhances production operations to control and manage the production. Recognized as a cost-efficient solution, the VFM (virtual flowmeter) is a mathematical-based technology designed to estimate the flowrates using available field instrumentation. The VFM approach developed in this work combines black-box simulations with mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem to obtain the flowrates dismissing the tuning process. The methodology included a set of multiphase flow correlations, and the MILP was developed to estimate the flowrate and designate the best fit model. We evaluated the proposed VFM against 649 well test data. The methodology presented 4.1% average percentage error (APE) for percentile 25% and 13.5% APE for percentile 50%. We developed a VFM technology to be used in scenarios with a lack of data, and we believe that our tuning-free method can contribute to the future of VFM technologies.