Building ADNOC's Pillars for Process Standardization and Best Practices through an Integrated Reservoir Management Framework

Abstract

UAE has one of the largest portfolios of reservoir development projects across the world. In managing such projects, ADNOC and its operating assets make multiple decisions to optimize production and recovery factor, by selecting the most adequate exploitation plan including among other, reservoir drainage architecture, production allowables and injection distribution. Reservoir management involves the monitoring, analysis and decision making to optimize business performance results and indicators. ADNOC has envioned strategic goals of reaching sustainable production targets while ascertaining quality assurance through consistency and standardization and by applying best practices. To achieve these strategic goals, ADNOC also identified the following needs, namely: (1) protect the intellectual capital of the workforce (2) train and deploy the growing young workforce faster and consistently, (3) generate the blueprint for consistent workflow execution and (4) provide the platform for expert knowledge sharing and best practices. To achieve these objectives, ADNOC has embraced a framework named Integrated Reservoir Management (IRM) as one of the key management best practices. IRM is a collection of building blocks, processes, and workflows from surveillance strategy to opportunity generation and execution monitoring. The framework also delineates a set of measurements that allows monitoring of reservoir performance management in the operating assets. It also provides a firm basis for connecting the company strategy with those cross-disciplinary processes and workflows in its day-to-day operations. World-class reservoir management processes include the optimum planning and utilization of reservoir surveillance activities, proper data and information integration to reveal reservoir opportunities, proactive decision making and continuous monitoring of performance. In this paper, we discuss the experiences in implementing IRM across ADNOC operating assets during the previous two (2) years. The project started identifying current (or as-is) processes used in the operating companies (OPCOs) and across International Oil Companies (IOCs). Based on the analysis of multiple processes in OPCO, a framework of 6 blocks, 18 processes and 29 workflows was developed. As a result of implementation, IRM framework has allowed sharing standard reservoir management workflows with the added benefits of (a) shortening learning curves to new employees, and hence reducing the total cycle time, resulting in increased productivity, (b) measuring KPI's that cultivate proper behaviors to integrate the right multi-disciplinary efforts in delivering consistent results and (c) fostering a new culture that continuously challenge status quo with consistency.