Company Profile
The Expro Group is a leading international oilfield
services company that surveys and manages oil and gas wells, from
exploration through to development and production.
Situation -
Achieving Optimum Recovery Efficiency in Oilfields
In order
to ensure that hydrocarbon recovery efficiency is maximized, production
from a reservoir needs to be managed effectively. As a rough guideline,
the recovery efficiency is measured as the ratio of the total amount of
produced hydrocarbons to the total initial reservoir volume. In actual
fact, this ratio seldom exceeds 30% for an oil reservoir, which means
that any improvement in the recovery factor, even by a small percentage,
can therefore be very significant to the operator.
To achieve the optimum recovery efficiency, and hence see the best return on
investment for a project, an operator has to know what is happening in the
reservoir at any time. For example, knowing the average pressure in the drainage
area around a particular well determines the rate at which the well should be
produced in relation to other wells, ensuring that recovery from the total field
is uniform throughout. The acquisition of data is therefore vital in the
management of any reservoir.
Permanent Monitoring involves the positioning of downhole instrumentation close
to the reservoir installed with the completion as a means of providing continuous
real time information. The Expro Group needed a software package that they could
offer to customers directly that interfaced with their electronic surface data
management components
Solution - ExtrakTM Permanent Data Monitoring
Measuresoft
worked with the Expro Group to produce an OEM version of our SCADA product for Expro.
After a few custom applications were bundled
into the software the Expro Group released ExTrakTM
, to manage data collection, monitoring, storage, trending and
alarming.
To allow easy access and transfer data from
field to shore based locations ExTrakTM comes fully
configured to support traditional serial communications through RS232,
RS485 or the more up-to-date protocols such as OPC, ODBC and DDE. In the
case of condition monitoring, ExTrakTM can be programmed to
provide alarms through input screens, or broadcast alarms across
telephone or pager networks. In addition to initiating alarms,
ExTrakTM
can be used for control and, in the
instance of Electrical Submersible Pump monitoring, can be used (through PLCs)
to shut down the ESP on a specified alarm condition.
With e-commerce and the availability of Internet connectivity, a tailored
client version can now be installed on a customer network to allow direct access
to well data, anywhere in the world. Internet connections enable multiple user
access to the data, with the required security measures. In this mode, the Expro
Group builds and supports web pages to suit client requirements. Measuresoft have
provided a suite of OPC enabled real-time instrumentation ActiveX Controls to
facilitate this.
Benefits
Immediate benefits of Permanent Monitoring are provided through:
-
A reduced number of well interventions, therefore
improving safety levels by decreasing the frequency of necessary
hazardous operations;
-
High frequency of data using technology which
provides information at one second sampling intervals;
-
Real time data acquisition, enabling any changes in
reservoir performance to be detected immediately.
This data acquisition is valuable to an operator throughout the entire life
of a reservoir. During early field life, it is used to optimize well design
through improved drilling programmes and completion design. Throughout the peak
productive life of the well, it will be used to monitor ongoing efficiency and,
in later field life, to monitor secondary recovery mechanisms.
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