Visualizing disparate data types can greatly assist production optimization.
From interpreting seismic surveys that identify the most promising hydrocarbon resources to monitoring daily fluid and pressure metrics, there are dozens of factors and activities that impact oil and gas production. Yet, the biggest challenge for asset teams is finding the means to holistically evaluate these factors, explore their interdependencies, and make modifications to optimize production.
Visualization software plays a critical role in helping oil and gas professionals understand the data generated or acquired during each activity associated with the exploration, drilling, and production cycles, and identify opportunities for production optimization. From that perspective, the best oil and gas production optimization software integrates disparate data sources and incorporates it into time variable geospatial volumes where changes in production volume can be tied to other geologic, petrophysical, and reservoir simulation data.
Production Optimization Requires Data Sharing Among Disciplines
Production optimization is a continual process that begins with well design guided by detailed and accurate geologic and petrophysical data. Reservoir simulation models provide additional insight regarding the estimated production potential of hydrocarbon assets, presenting useful information for engineers.
- Drilling engineers use information from reservoir simulation models to efficiently recover the well’s estimated resources.
- Completion engineers rely on known reservoir characteristics, open-hole logs, and petrophysical data to determine the appropriate perforation locations, as well as pump types and sizes.
- Production engineers monitor flow rates, pressures, and temperatures in oilfield infrastructure such as valves, pumps, pipelines, and storage tanks.
Sharing of data, collaboration among disciplines, and continual review of changing geospatial and reservoir characteristics is vital to production optimization. However, one of the biggest challenges for geophysicists and engineers is integrating and collaboratively sharing data in support of optimal production strategies.
Software Best Suited to Enhance Production Optimization
All phases of well completion and production design rely on software products developed specifically for the needs of each discipline—wellpath design, reservoir modeling, completion, production monitoring. Each software product is powerful in the hands of professional engineers, yet no single software product provides a full understanding of the data and production processes.
Discipline-specific software produces necessary numerical data but fails to incorporate the geospatial context that includes the geologic, petrophysical, or reservoir models for the well or field. Full understanding of the engineering process of well planning, completion, and production design requires the integration of data from individual engineering software packages into an inclusive geospatial/temporal model. When engineers across multiple disciplines can evaluate production data in the context of evolving geospatial data and changing reservoir conditions, they gain a clearer picture of all factors that affect production.
Integrate Data to Quickly Correlate Events with Conditions
By visually integrating production data with geologic, petrophysical, and temporal reservoir simulation models and 4D (time sequence) seismic data, production engineers can quickly correlate events with changing conditions. For example, a sudden, unexplained loss of oil production in a well can be the result of water encroachment clearly visible in the seismic data and the reservoir simulation model. With this insight, engineers can determine the water source—perhaps a water injector well in close proximity. This enables them to quickly focus on the problem and make time-critical decisions on how best to remedy the situation.
CoViz 4D Integrates and Visualizes Data to Optimize Production
Engineers across the various disciplines responsible for production optimization understand that the data they rely on and the software they use provides a vital, but only a partial portion of the information needed to optimize production. The best oil and gas production optimization software integrates the disparate datasets from these disciplines—geologic, petrophysical, reservoir, and production, and visualizes them in a collaborative data environment.
CoViz 4D is an integrated software solution that delivers all these capabilities. When data from individual (phase) production optimization software products are integrated into CoViz 4D’s collaborative data environment, the combined information can be viewed and analyzed in a geospatial/temporal context allowing all involved disciplines to reach well-informed decisions to optimize oil and gas production.
