Devon Energy and Software Partners Enable Automatic Bottomhole Pressure Calculations

Abstract

_ More than a decade ago, Devon Energy made it a priority to enhance its digital infrastructure which has led to a step change in internal data access along with how the company securely works with its third-party vendors. Easy access to relevant, trustworthy, and value-adding data has become the norm, not the exception, for the US oil and gas producer’s subsurface engineering teams. The upside extends beyond mere convenience, however, and translates directly into faster decision making which is one of the keys to success in the dynamic landscape of unconventional developments. When data is seamlessly connected for daily consumption, engineers engage with it regularly, integrating it into their daily workflows. Additionally, we see that the frequency of use is directly correlated with accessibility. The emphasis on accessibility reflects Devon’s proactive efforts to treat its data more and more as a valuable asset. By democratizing data and analysis tools, business-impacting insights are more readily available to engineers and decision-makers throughout the organization. This case study outlines one of the most recent and tangible outcomes of this collaborative philosophy: automatic calculation of bottomhole pressure (BHP). Solving for Bottomhole Pressures As shown in Fig. 1, accurate and reliable flowing BHP data is a critical input for a number of important engineering applications in both conventional and unconventional settings: reservoir simulation, production diagnostics, nodal analysis, rate transient analysis, pressure transient analysis, and material balance. The list goes on, but the overarching point is that BHP data allows engineers to make informed decisions, i.e., high-confidence estimations on future well production, reservoir management, and optimization strategies. The rub is that acquiring accurate BHP measurements has historically been a luxury service that is too costly to scale up beyond a few science projects. Operators that desire such critical data often turn to BHP gauges, which are positioned down in the wellbore to measure pressure at a specific depth. But given an average cost of $50,000 per installation, it is estimated that less than 5% of all horizontal wells drilled during the North American shale revolution have benefited from the use of downhole gauges. Without a downhole gauge, operators must calculate the pressures from surface pressure. The problem here is again one of scale. Using surface pressure has traditionally required the manual gathering of the proper data sets and calculating BHP. From there, the process is not only time consuming but considered to be error prone. Applying any of the published methods may take a reasonably experienced engineer half an hour to complete a BHP calculation and the odds of a miscalculation rise as the data set grows in size and complexity.