Case Study Smart production operations in a remote field in Ecuador
Implementing smart production operations to improve operational performance and efficiency.
Production Chemicals Optimization on Delfi
Protect ESPs against corrosion and scale and extend pump run life via real-time monitoring, analysis, and autonomous chemical injection optimization
Overview
2023 Materials Performance Corrosion Innovation of the Year Awards winner
Production Chemicals Optimization on Delfi
Are your ESPs failing from scale and corrosion? Implement a digital solution for monitoring, analysis, and autonomous chemical injection to increase ESP uptime.
A fully integrated, open digital solution to dynamically manage production performance
Production systems are dynamic by nature, with constantly varying conditions. That’s why chemical injection systems must be repeatedly adjusted to ensure continuous protection of critical assets and optimize opex. Production Chemicals Optimization on Delfi™ innovatively solves the common flow assurance and asset integrity challenges of corrosion and scale by harmoniously adjusting chemical injection to the changes in production.
By leveraging digital capabilities, what were previously manual chemical treatment processes requiring frequent field visits are transformed into autonomous chemical injection systems. Your existing equipment is connected for real-time data acquisition to inform inline use of physics-based models such as a virtual flowmeter, edge analytics, and cloud computing. From this contextual basis, Production Chemicals Optimization on Delfi autonomously generates actionable insights and adjusts chemical injection. This continuous optimization of injection extends both ESP uptime and the life of production equipment. The number of field visits is significantly reduced, along with their carbon emissions.
Production Chemicals Optimization on Delfi seamlessly integrates the well’s chemical injection system with digital capabilities to reduce the time from insight to action. This new way of working replaces conventional low-frequency manual assessment and adjustment with real-time monitoring, analysis, and autonomous chemical injection to efficiently manage corrosion and scale.
Applications
Optimize autonomous chemical injection of corrosion and scale inhibitors
- Real-time corrosion and scale risk identification
Up-to-the-minute information means no more waiting months for usable data from traditional manual monitoring. - Automated generation of actionable insights
Automated advisory system identifies at-risk wells and generates insights to optimize chemical injection. - Autonomous chemical injection
Chemical pump rates are adjusted in real time in response to automated insights to ensure effective chemical injection and treatment.
Benefits
End manual delays
The challenge: Manual performance monitoring delays event detection. Corrosion and scale are two of the most common challenges facing producers today, with inhibitors accounting for >50% of the USD 8 billion global production chemical spend. The problem in managing corrosion and scale through chemical injection does not lie in inhibitor formulation—these are proved to be highly effective in protecting production systems. The weak link in chemical treatment programs is the manual technique traditionally employed to monitor risks and chemical performance, which introduces delays in taking preventive action and undermines alignment of the chemical treatment with the ever-changing well conditions.
The solution: Production Chemicals Optimization on Delfi significantly reduces the time from insight to action by acquiring and processing data in real time to provide continuous optimization recommendations and autonomous action.
Optimize monitoring
The challenge: Ineffectively managed corrosion and scale risk can lead to wells failing prematurely. This causes producers to incur increased workover costs and experience decreased production revenue. For example, an onshore producer had a conventional manual corrosion and scale chemical treatment program but was running up more than USD 8 million in annual workover costs and more than USD 5 million in annual production losses. These costs were largely due to the suboptimal frequency inherent in manual corrosion and scale risk monitoring methods.
The solution: Production Chemicals Optimization on Delfi leverages edge intelligence via Agora™ edge AI and IoT solutions and executes physics-based models using real-time data to continuously monitor changes in well conditions and their impact on corrosion and scale risk for ultimately mitigating the occurrence of well failures.
Target treatments
The challenge: Wells are not static systems, yet manually managed chemical treatments can remain unchanged for weeks until new data is made available. This lack of treatment alignment results in chronic overtreatment or undertreatment, neither of which mitigates corrosion and scale risk effectively and can lead to production shutdowns and increased costs.
The solution: Production Chemicals Optimization on Delfi enables real-time optimization, including autonomous control of the chemical injection pumps. The result is chemical injection that is continuously on target, eliminating over- and undertreatment and their deleterious effects on production.
Increase ESP run life
The challenge: Ineffective production chemical treatment affects ESP performance. It is the root cause of >20% of ESP failures, resulting in lost production and rising workover costs. Over- and undertreatment issues primarily stem from the inability of traditional manual monitoring of changes in well conditions to provide data at sufficient frequency for continuously optimizing chemical treatments.
The solution: Production Chemicals Optimization on Delfi enables monitoring critical data such as production rates, injection rates, and scale and corrosion risk in real time so that interventions can be performed at optimal frequency.
Features
Digitally enabled workflows inform autonomous production chemical treatment for ESPs
By digitalizing monitoring, analysis, prediction, and treatment as a continuous closed-loop process, Production Chemicals Optimization on Delfi makes critical data such as production rates and system risks available as often as every minute, depending on the operator’s data frequency. Furthermore, Production Chemicals Optimization on Delfi is an open system, applicable regardless of the chemical or ESP provider. Operators’ organizations are provided with cloud-based access to real-time data updates as frequently as 1,440 times per day. Autonomous surveillance and injection rate optimization mean that ESPs are protected against corrosion- and scale-induced failures, which enables increased uptime and ultimately production revenue.
Case Studies