Development and Implementation of the AVAILS+ Collaborative Forecasting Tool for Production Assurance in the Kuwait Oil Company, North Kuwait (KOC NK)

Abstract

Summary AVAILS+ is a short-term forecasting tool designed to lead the production-assurance efforts of the North Kuwait Asset [Sabriyah, Raudhatain, Ratqa, Abdali, and Bahrah fields of the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC)]. The term "AVAILS" is a shorthand term for "Available Production," whereas the "+" connotes the extended capabilities of both the technology (suite of dashboard metrics) and the methodology (team building and collaboration). The tool has been developed jointly between KOC North Kuwait (KOC NK) and Quantum Reservoir Impact (QRI). AVAILS+ design principles are firmly rooted within Reservoir Competency Asymmetric Assessment (RCAA) (Saleri and Toronyi 2011), QRI's empirically driven investigative process for qualifying and quantifying reservoir fundamentals. As a technology, the tool can best be described as an "enterprise mashup," a collection of exploration-and-production data stores integrated into a reservoir-analytics engine with dashboards for tracking primary drivers of the production forecast. This high degree of data integration, coupled with its visual nature (dashboards), enables better cross-organization transparency and collaboration with respect to execution of the recovery plan for production assurance. There is nothing novel about short-term forecasts, metrics, dashboards, or fit-for-purpose databases—all which are components of this enterprise mashup. What is unique is the way in which AVAILS + elegantly unifies these components into a strategic decision-making engine for KOC NK. There have been genuine new insights within this business-intelligence approach to managing the reservoirs of KOC NK, all leading the workforce to an improved understanding of reservoir fundamentals and, consequently, better, more-informed, and more-timely decisions.