The number of wells in an oil field could indicate the size of an oil and gas company. A small oil and gas field with 30 wells in it can be managed by traditional radio channel and phone call. Field personnels use handy talkie to communicate and a phone line connect the field and head office.
On the other hand, a large oil and gas field such as an oil field that has 1000 oil producers, 300 gas wells, and 200 injection wells would require a data and communication system to manage the field and decrease communication traffic. In a large oil and gas field, sometimes there are 30 field production engineers, several PEs and Geologists, a subsurface and reservoir group, a production technologist group, a maintenance group, drilling/workover group, facility group, and business support group.
Without a data and communication system, an Operation Manager (OM) will be busy making/receiving calls and emails. But the manager still can not answer immediately where the rig service # 30 is. Are the BHP survey crews doing their job in well # 30? Where is the new log from well # 201? What is the status of the injection pump being repaired? How about the water sample going into injection wells for future enhanced oil recovery (EOR)? Managers, team leads, and personnel will spend a lot of time making and receiving calls and searching emails every day to answer such questions. Data and communication traffic could be reduced by storing data, status, and reports in a system that could be pulled out immediately from the system.
The system in Figure 1 is for managing large oil fields. Many top oilfield companies use such data and communication systems to manage large oil and gas field operations. The operation manager or everyone who is authorized to open the system can see the operation directly on the screen. He or she can get the status of every item on the screen with one click away. Crew and equipment schedules were entered into the system. A sign will pop up on the screen if there is any schedule conflict. The assigned supervisor must solve the conflict immediately. The system makes large oil field operations organized and efficient. Also, the operation manager or whoever authorized to open the system can see directly on the screen the position of every equipment or operation car since they are equipped with GPS locators. If there is unassigned equipment, car, or crews at wrong location, related actions can be taken immediately.
Every key person, engineers, geologist, team leaders, etc. can input data into the system. They can put the crews, equipment, cars, maintenance schedule, or new data collected into the system. The operation manager (OM) can download the information which will pop-up on the screen. If the manager needs the lab results of the water sample injected into the well, just by doing several clicks, the manager gets the information.
iThe system is complicated. Top oil field company as big as Chevron uses many softwares such as D7i for facility maintenance, DSS for reservoir analysis, Chears for heat management tools, WEO for workover scheduler, LOWIS job plan, HES, Beam analysis workbench, Catalist. Key persons, engineers, Artificial lift specialists, Field sup, etc. enter their job plans or schedules into the server and can be downloaded by the OM. Their job plans or schedules are based on weekly meetings after reviewing production scorecard, well test differences, or the job results for the jobs that had been done in the previous week.
For smaller networks, the information traffic can be validated and organized by an engineer (such as a petroleum engineer) to replace those many softwares.
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