How to establish an integrated production management system across the reservoir lifecycle

Abstract

Successful reservoir management today is inextricably linked with the field’s production system and a complete evaluation of the behavior of that system throughout the reservoir lifecycle. Operator challenges include the need to efficiently design and safely operate production systems for optimum oil and gas delivery under any conditions; the ability to assess a wide variety of scenarios to understand the limits of the production system while still optimizing recovery; and the importance of minimizing downtime by effectively responding to events that impact flow. There is also a need for operators to communicate between multiple technical domains from reservoir characterization, flow simulation and network simulation to processing facilities. Yet, is today’s exploration and production software able to effectively integrate reservoir engineering and production environments and effectively utilize reservoir models so that operators can obtain a complete picture of the field and have a fully effective reservoir and production management solution? This article will examine whether this is being achieved and introduce an integrated production management workflow from Emerson.