Expert Advisory System for Production Surveillance and Optimization Assisted by Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Petroleum Engineers are usually responsible for 50-200 wells. The wells in highly instrumented fields generate 10-20 measurements every few seconds. This makes it difficult to be on top of every well, every day. This challenge carries a significant opportunity cost, therefore the surveillance process requires automation by implementing surveillance-by-exception. Faster identification of problems is great, but not enough unless the required activities are executed in a timely manner. The ability to execute quickly and safely requires a well-structured coordination effort between the different disciplines involved in field operations. In line with ADNOC Digital Transformation strategy, the solution described in this paper intends to couple surveillance by exception (a Petroleum Engineering workflow) with field operations execution (a multi-disciplinary set of workflows in the field). The integration is achieved by creating a simple yet robust action tracking system, and feeding it automatically with new opportunities, so that it is kept up to date. Automatic diagnosis becomes opportunities. Opportunities become activities. Activities are assigned, executed and closed. All activities are tracked on a high level, which provides insights and visibility to all parties on who is doing what, when and how to close the opportunity. The surveillance by exception engine consumes real time measurements from the historian. It then runs a set of soft sensors using full physics, reduced order models, proxy and data driven machine learning models, which utilize most of the measurements. The measured and calculated values are then fed to an expert system, which automatically diagnoses the wells and creates tickets with recommendations to the production engineer. The engineer reviews the ticket and forwards to field operations for execution. The log of activities enables a direct measure of operational effectiveness. This paper describes the philosophy of the system, how it works, lessons learned and the results of implementation across 6 oilfields and 600+ wells in Abu Dhabi.