Harnessing Intelligent Field Capabilities for Early Understanding of Reservoir Behavior and Proactive Decisions

With recent advancements in field instrumentation technologies and the expansion of Saudi Aramco’s state-of-the-art intelligent field infrastructure, a wealth of valuable knowledge is being derived from integrating intelligent field capabilities with best-in-class reservoir management practices. Intelligent field applications have already leveraged real-time reservoir surveillance data to enable timely responses and fast interventions for events observed from real-time data. As richer and more granular datasets are collected from the field, deeper insights and understanding of the reservoirs are gained at fractions of the needed time where intelligent field capabilities are not present. The abundance and timely processing of intelligent field data enables more tactical adjustments in reservoir management strategy. This type of real-time reservoir management has already shown great value in reservoir performance optimization. This paper discusses several cases in which an intelligent field enabled early detection of anomalies and shortened the timecycle for an analysis, decision and action. The first case discusses the early detection of localized pressure support anomalies due to poor rock quality. This timely detection, facilitated by intelligent field infrastructure, enabled quick decision making and actions to overcome the anomaly. The second case shows how real-time monitoring of reservoir pressure propagation has helped to detect over-injection in two injectors with malfunctioned meters. This has allowed timely action to ensure uniform pressure propagation and repair of faulty equipment. The third case shows that the utilization of real-time data has assisted in detecting a casing leak in a short time, which helped in making a corrective action to restore the well’s capacity. In all three cases, had an intelligent field not been there, the time-cycle from detection to analysis, and to decision and action, would have been substantially longer, resulting in higher operational costs and an impact on reservoir performance.