Unlocking the Production Potential of Brown Fields through Gas Lift Optimization GLO

Abstract

As a Brown Field, located in North Africa. Approximately 95% of Zarzaitine field wells are utilizing Gas Lift as an artificial lift method. The field has a challenging situation to optimize its Oil production; A detailed understanding of the production sys tem thermohydraulic, facility design and the amount of gas injection will ultimately have a major effect on production target. For this purpose, modeling the entire production system was necessary to properly account for the interdependency of wells and surface equipment and determine the system deliverability as a whole by optimizing Gas Lift injection. This paper presents an approach which was introduced for the first time in this field to ensure gas is used efficiently using a multiphase flow simulator for wells and pipelines to model the entire field Production Network in addition to the Oil producing wells including Gas lift mandrels. The model includes 112 Gas Lift wells with a detailed Gas Lift valves system currently on production, each one has been matched against the latest valid well test, Seven Separation Centers, Production gathering pipelines, Production gathering Center and Gas Lift Injection Center. The study has been executed in three major phases: Well Modeling & Calibration, Network Modeling and Gas Lift Optimization. Total Oil production rate has been defined as an objective function during the optimization phase where the total Injected Gas Lift rate for the entire network and for each individual well have been defined as varying parameters; By having a network model calibrated against field data representing the operational conditions of the asset, performing Gas Lift Optimization was the natural next step. Subsequently, by simulating the production system with different Gas Lift Optimization scenarios to maximize Oil production rate under specific surface facilities constraints using the Production Network Model, a better insight of how gas injection rate affects the total production and an understanding of whether a smarter allocation of the current available gas is possible in comparison to the different scenarios has been accomplished. As a result of this Optimization by applying some local and global constraints a 10% Oil production increase has been achieved. This practice has been shown to be successful as predictive technique in a variety of ways specially for such brown fields with more than 60 years of production history. As a next step, to properly manage the real potential of Brown fields, a full field Integrated Asset Model could be created to capture the interaction between the surface and the sub-surface. This model will account for the complex interactions between reservoir, wells and pipelines.