GeDIg: Petrobras Corporate Program for Digital Integrated Field Management

Abstract

Foreseeing near future opportunities for oil and gas fields, Petrobras created a corporate program dedicated to study, develop, and implement Digital Integrated Field Management (GeDIg) among its production assets. Over the last three years, Petrobras has been developing a pilot strategy based on multiple scenarios to evaluate the technology level of digital oilfields. Six assets were chosen, taking into account the diversity of production processes (heavy oil, offshore, onshore, brown, and green fields) found all over the Brazilian fields. Two different approaches were implemented: in-house development and partnership with integrated companies. Petrobras program is supported by three fundamental elements: people, process, and technology. Humanware, workflow processes, and change management are the key factors for new technologies implementation such as collaboration centers, intelligent completion, and fast loop artificial lift optimization. After the pilots first year of operation, lessons learned will be gathered to guide the expansion of the digital oilfield concept for other Petrobras assets. The objective of this work is to describe the methodology applied in the six pilots and how Petrobras is going to improve its digital way of work and add value to its assets with Digital Integrated Oil and Gas Field Management. Introduction E&P is moving towards a new digital era, where technology supports new workflow processes, and Petrobras, foreseeing the near future opportunities for oil and gas fields, created a corporate program dedicated to study, develop, and implement Digital Integrated Field Management (GeDIg) among its production assets. Petrobras defined a pilot strategy based on multiple production scenarios, taking into account its production processes diversity (heavy / light oil, brown / green, offshore / onshore fields). The main goal of the pilot strategy is to evaluate the benefits of digital oilfield implementation, combining production scenarios with asset intelligence level. Six assets were chosen and different approaches were considered. In each pilot, the digital fields are being designed with real time operation, data base integration, and collaborative functional model to achieve faster decisions based on concise and reliable information. To implement the new digital way of work, humanware, workflow processes redesign, and change management become important tools to transform the processes into its TO BE form. The methodology applied in the pilot strategy is presented in the next section, followed by the detailed description of each pilot. At the end, the lessons learned from the GeDIg program will be presented. Pilot Strategy Digital Integrated Field Management (GeDIg) is E&P integrated management for production processes to add value to oilfield through personnel training and right time information access (automation, modeling and simulation). In addition, GeDIg aims real time monitoring and control, production and cost optimization, pursuing ultimate reservoir recovery augmentation. Besides digital oilfield benefits evaluation, GeDIg program expects to design the best strategy for a multi-production scenario in broad digital field implementation.

An automation system for gas-lifted oil wells: Model identification, control, and optimization

“…Future work will be geared towards incorporating compressor facilities, considering pressure constraints, and developing procedures to start and shut down oil wells. The long-term goal is to deliver unmanned platforms and foster the smart fields and GeDIg technologies (Murray et al, 2006;Moisés et al, 2008).…”

“…However, the development of such systems is a formidable challenge, entailing the design of sensors, information systems, and control and optimization algorithms of considerable complexity. This technology is known as smart fields, i-fields, field of the future, and digital integrated field management (GeDIg) (Plucenio and Pagano, 2004;Moisés et al, 2008).…”

A Mixed-Integer convex formulation for production optimization of gas-lifted oil fields with routing and pressure constraints

“…These are evolving technologies often referred to as smart fields (Williams and Webb, 2007;Moisés et al, 2008). However, before this concept is transferred to the oil fields, significant challenges in science and technology should be overcome.…”

Intelligent Energy Concepts in Executive Education for Oil & Gas Professionals

“…For example, Saputelli et al (2003Saputelli et al ( , 2007aSaputelli et al ( , 2007b, Hocking & Shahly (2008), Moisés et al (2008), Vinturini et al (2008) and Sankaran et al (2009) report on the experience of implementing this vision for Digital Integrated Field Management, Rangow & Govia (2008) discuss the implementation for LNG Operations and Ursem et al (2003) for Drilling Operations.…”