Karachaganak Unified Action Team – KUAT Journey to Cross-Functional Collaboration

Abstract

Karachaganak is one of the world's largest oil and gas condensate fields in a deep heterogeneous carbonate reservoir with complex sour fluid system located in Western Kazakhstan. Karachaganak's estimated reserves are over 2.4 Bln bbls of condensate and 16 tcf of gas. The asset is co-operated by Shell and Eni through Karachaganak Petroleum Operating (KPO) b.v. Joint Venture. KPO successfully deployed a new KUAT operating center with aim to maximize production and improve collaboration among key functional groups managing day-to-day field activities. Maximizing oil production means getting the most condensate liquids to surface at a given gas (or other) constraints by routing producer wells through the network to arrive at the lowest field GOR. Experience showed that the key success factor was to establish a collaboration between Subsurface and Production departments built upon common understanding of field data. Physical embodiment of this collaboration is the Karachaganak Unified Action Team – KUAT, which means "power" in Kazakh. This center was established in 2020 with physical placement of Petroleum Engineers together with Production, Process and Planning Engineers in one Operating Center at the field site. The objectives of KUAT team include the following short-term integrated activities: Daily well line-up optimization as per integrated limit diagram views Integrated activity planning – e.g. optimized start-up of the new wells and projects Well surveillance planning and execution – from reference plans, EBS and opportunity-based GOR management Flow assurance KUAT team utilizes the industry standard digital solutions like PI and PI vision and Petex type of solvers as well as custom-made integrators like Data Integrator and Network Optimizer (DINO). In order to ensure that production is always maximized and potential downtime is minimized a robust understanding of the limit diagrams and well potentials is required. This information is provided by live integrated dashboards which include the real-time data from subsurface to export routes. The overall contribution from KUAT is estimated at ~7,000 BOPD or 3% of incremental field production. This paper will cover the overview of KUAT journey from early concept development to current state explaining how this center operates today. Workflows and improvements are included in the discussion as well as challenges faced throughout the implementation of newly developed team within the organization