Digital oilfields could help the region to raise its production levels in the coming years, but so far oil firms have been slow to implement this new wave of technology
The oil and gas industry must act quickly to bring its oil field-based technologies up to date, if it is to maximise production and profitability in the coming years, according to Dr Hathem Nasr, oilfield consultant at Kuwait Oil Company (KOC).
“One of the main challenges is that the oil and gas industry has been very conservative in terms of implementing smart field technology.
What we have seen in the last 5-6 years has been transformitive in terms of telecommunications capability and I think we need to embrace it and roll it out as quickly as possible to facilitate the implementation of digital oil field technology,” he said.
The last decade has been amongst the worst in recent years in terms of new oil and gas discoveries.
With the industry failing to find new oil at a sufficient rate to meet spiralling demand, attention will inevitably focus on maximising the production levels of existing reserves.
According to Nasr, the acquisition, compilation and analysis of oilfield data will be fundamental to achieving this aim.
The term ‘digital oilfield’ or ‘smart field’ refers to fields whose data and production levels can be viewed, amended and even shut down remotely, without the need for physical human intervention, as Nasr explains.
“Imagine a hypothetical field where you have 300 to 400 wells. This field has artificial lift, gas lift, electrical submersible pumps, as well as steam injection going on.
With a digital oilfield, you have information from the subsurface, that’s coming in through some downhole sensors from all of these applications. You have surface information relating to pressure, temperature and flow. All this information is being streamed in real time to a remote location,” he said.
Recent advances in oilfield technology means that the information can now be presented through more accurate and informative visualisation schemes, meaning that the time taken for data analysts to interpret the information is dramatically reduced. 3D models are created for each well and for the reservoir, which gives the team of analysts a powerful visual tool to help assess all aspects of the operation.
“The most important aspect of this is to bring the information in a unified form to a collaboration centre, where you have not only the production engineer looking at the information, but also the reservoir expert, the artificial lift expert and so on.
All these people are analysing the data together in a collaborative way, in order to make better decisions than they could do on their own. That is the essence of a digital oilfield,” he said.
Currently around 85% of the wells in the Middle East are not monitored in real time, meaning that monitoring and maintenance work needs to be carried out manually by well technicians who travel to the site. As Khalid Alusail, Chief Technology Officer for Huawei in Saudi Arabia, points out, this can often involve long, laborious travel times to site to perform menial tasks.
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“I have seen cases where people will get in their car and drive around in the desert for two hours just to connect their laptop to the RTU to reset a port which would not take more than one minute,” he said.
This inefficiency in detecting problems in wells and reservoirs is costing the industry millions of dollars.
“The way they currently do maintenance is they send an engineer to the well for a scheduled visit. The next visit will not be for a month. By the time you do the second visit the whole well could be corrupted. You don’t want to wait for one month because by that time corrosion will have started. Then you have to rebuild the whole well which will take a minimum of 6 months,” said Alusail.
As well as being grossly inefficient, this also presents a significant risk to employee safety. According to Nasr, driving related incidents account for around 50% of oil & gas workplace injuries and deaths.
“This is a real safety issue for oil and gas companies. I don’t want to see employees driving for 2 hours in the desert where there is no mobile phone coverage. If their car breaks down, how are we to find them?” said Alusail.
Nasr believes that this culture of inefficiency is rife in the region and steps must be taken to curb it.
“Today in many of the biggest oil and gas companies, the way we find out if a well has shut down is by touching the pipeline and manually measuring it. These are achaic methods. I’m not talking about wells in the USA that produce 20 barrels a day. I’m talking about prolific wells that are producing thousands of barrels per day,” he said.
Analysts have suggested that up until now, oil and gas firms have used the issues of security and logistics as reasons to delay the transition to digital oil fields. Technology is now beginning to mitigate these concerns; however, certain difficulties still remain.
It is notoriously difficult, for example, to install fibre cables in a brownfield site, due to the fields’ aged infrastructure. Similarly, operators are wary of transmitting enormous quantities of data wirelessly, for fear of it being corrupted or hacked. However, many analysts now believe that technology has evolved sufficiently to deal with these risks.
“In the old days, wireless technology provided a reliability rating of about 80%, now its more like 98-99%, which is pretty good,” said Nasr.
One option available to operators of both brown and greenfield sites is to break up the transmission of data into stages. The relatively short journey from the well head to the gathering centre can be done via wireless technology. The longer journey from the gathering centre to the head office, which may be hundreds of kilometres away, can be sent via fibre optic cables.
New digital oilfield technologies are being built with the objective of maximising production at brownfield sites in mind. In light of this, much of the required technology can easily interface with older and existing operating systems, reducing the need for retrofitting of existing equipment.
As the Middle East looks to boost its production figures for oil and gas in the coming years, digital oilfield expansion will be of critical importance.
“The most fundamental thing is that we need to have the data. The communication framework needs to be there. If you do not have the data, you can not have all these other things. You can not have smart fields, you can not have collaboration. Now we see that a lot of new communication technology is capable of interfacing with existing technology,” said Nasr.
