The North Sea is characterized by its predominantly mature oil and gas fields, which present significant challenges including rising operational and maintenance costs. Advanced tech is essential to address these issues, but a crucial question remains: How can we tackle declining production while maximizing the value of existing fields, not only in the North Sea but globally?
Managing the decline of oil and gas production—the new norm
The remaining life of oil fields is increasingly focused on decline management, with mature fields becoming the industry standard. The good news is that collaboration, particularly between operators and tech leaders, provides nearly all the necessary tools for managing them. That said, greater integration is needed to address these challenges effectively.
The North Sea is on the cusp of an exciting new chapter focused on the optimization of mature fields.
Many fields in the North Sea are mature, requiring techniques like water flooding and polymer injection to maintain their production levels. The emphasis is now on integrating novel tech from across the board to better optimize these fields.
Digitalization, automation, and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques, for example, are crucial. Not only can they optimize field operations, but they can also extend a mature field’s life by improving its recovery rates while simultaneously reducing its operational costs.
Planning for future oilfield developments
For operators embarking on new field developments, it’s crucial to plan with recovery challenges in mind from the outset. This means considering not just the initial production but also how to maintain output over time. The approach involves a thorough understanding of the field's geological characteristics, the application of advanced modeling techniques, and the adoption of innovative drilling and extraction technologies. A focus on sustainability and environmental impact is also essential, ensuring that operations are compliant with regulations and designed to minimize their footprint.
Historically, the industry focused on exploration, primary production, and secondary production, often neglecting the long-term management of mature assets. Today, it is evident that greenfield developments must consider EOR strategies from the get-go, including comprehensive data collection that facilitates future decisions for extending the field’s productive life.
Collaborative efforts with tech providers and industry experts can facilitate custom solution development and the sharing of best practices, but operators must be agile, ready to adapt to changing market conditions and technological advancements.
The industry must also prioritize decommissioning strategies for fields that reach the end of their productive life. This involves planning for the secure and efficient decommissioning of infrastructure while always focused on minimizing environmental impact.
Leveraging new technologies across oilfield operations
The potential of mature fields remains significant, but implementing new technologies in future developments is essential. The advent of cloud computing, the Industrial Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and machine learning is transforming the industry by reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and improving recovery factors.
Smart fields, which self-manage through integrated technologies, represent a significant leap forward and are fast becoming a reality.
Traditionally, subsurface teams have made significant investments and efforts in building models that encapsulate all the acquired subsurface information and its interpretations. What if we could automatically extract insights from the subsurface models and generate operational recommendations for production optimization? What if we could fully operationalize the subsurface model?
For instance, in waterflooding assets, understanding subsurface flow and interwell communication is crucial. By intelligently allocating injection water, operations teams can ensure a balanced oil sweep across the reservoir. Moreover, insights from subsurface models can identify workover opportunities, such as water control or the identification of bypassed hydrocarbons, before they become critical issues.
In fields utilizing configurable downhole flow control devices, it’s essential to consider reservoir heterogeneities and fluid saturations for deferring unwanted fluid phases and balancing flow. This approach can significantly enhance the efficiency of the extraction process.
Meanwhile, to optimally allocate limited lift gas among wells and meet production targets, a comprehensive understanding of well potential and the evolving production fluid mix is required. This knowledge enables the smart distribution of resources, ensuring that each well contributes effectively to overall production goals.
The potential to operationalize subsurface models is vast, offering a pathway to smarter, more efficient, and more profitable operations.
The tech for integrating various aspects of field operations, from surface equipment to reservoir management, already exists today. The goal is to create a cohesive system where connectivity, measurement sensors, and fit-for-purpose model-based optimizers (e.g., software systems) work in unison to facilitate rapid and informed decision making by the operations teams.
Advancements in smart technologies have led to the development of fields that are increasingly autonomous, capable of self-regulation, and efficient in resource management. Combine that with the integration of reservoir data with field operations and you have yourself real-time analysis and adjustments for optimizing production.
Reducing pilot scheme timelines
Once a luxury, rapidly expanding EOR pilots to full-field implementation is more accessible thanks to optimization. Designing pilots used to be a complex, time-consuming, and costly process, but the energy industry recognized this and shifted toward faster pilot design and execution.
We now have tools to guide our decision making and design pilots efficiently, allowing multiple tests to be conducted simultaneously. This approach reduces the need for long, expensive pilot schemes by enabling quicker action—a requirement for managing fast-declining fields.
In the North Sea, for instance, fields are undergoing enhanced condensate recovery, while future prospective pilots could potentially be conducted in pressure-volume-temperature labs. The learnings from these and other projects around the world are invaluable, contributing to a growing knowledge base that can be applied to similar challenges elsewhere.
In addition, the integration of advanced petrophysical logging sensors with a formation tester device for in situ flooding with secondary or tertiary recovery agents offers a promising approach to optimize reservoir pilot tests. By measuring the dimensions and fluid saturation variations post-injection, this method could shorten the duration of pilot tests, which is crucial for fields with a life expectancy of about 10 years, which makes traditional lengthy tests impractical. This strategy aligns with recent studies that emphasize optimizing waterflooding and other recovery processes to enhance oil recovery while both minimizing operational costs and maximizing recovery.
Embracing mature oilfield optimization
The new focus of the oil industry is mature field optimization. This involves not only recovering more oil from existing fields but also integrating advanced technologies that illuminate reservoirs and connect data to field operations. Innovative tools and tech are now available to enhance reservoir understanding and operational efficiency, thereby enabling informed decisions that maximize field value.
Despite the challenges, this era offers exciting opportunities for the oil and gas industry. By shifting paradigms and embracing collaboration and innovation, the industry can push forward projects that maximize asset value. This new phase of mature field optimization, from the Middle East's giant fields to the North Sea's high water cut and high GOR challenges, is a testament to the industry's resilience and adaptability.
The learnings and technology are in place, and the potential for optimizing mature fields is immense. The oil industry is at an exciting juncture, where advanced technologies and collaborative efforts can transform the way mature fields are managed, ensuring continued productivity and value extraction.
