Distributed Acoustic Sensing for Day-To-Day Well, Reservoir and Facility Management

Abstract

Frequent surveillance data is essential for optimizing production and recovery, especially in complex reservoir and recovery settings such as waterfloods in highly compartmentalized stacked reservoirs and in IOR and EOR projects. However, in many cases data is acquired infrequently or not at all due to concerns regarding production deferment, costs, HSE exposure, and operational risks. Permanent in-well fibre optic cable installations offer a solution to this problem by enabling frequent measurements across a large section of a well at once without well interventions and without production deferment. The fibres can be utilized to provide distributed temperature, strain and acoustic measurements across the wellbore from which information on well integrity, on well flow behaviour, reservoir conditions and seismic data can be obtained. Although interpreting optical fibre measurements such as Distributed Acoustic Sensing or Distributed Temperature Sensing is not yet straightforward, significant progress has been made to provide actionable information shortly after data acquisition by providing an appropriate in-field infrastructure and easy to use tools for data handling and analysis. In this paper, we present recent examples from Brunei Shell Petroleum, where Distributed Acoustic Sensing data has been used in facile but impactful way for Smart Wells management and flow optimization. This work is a big step forward to make distributed data analysis an integral part of the day-to-day Well, Reservoir and Facilities Management.