"DIGITISING THE WELLBORE” Reshaping the oil industry

Chemical Tracer Systems in conjunction with trend profiling represent a technology to digitise the wellbore to enable zone-specific well event processing, exception-based well surveillance and continuous monitoring for optimised oil production.

Reshaping the oil industry – Digitalisation

Digitalisation is gaining increasing attention and focus among oil industry companies where the aim is to digitise all elements of the full oil production and export value chain. Elements of the well, facilities, compressors, pipelines, terminals etc. should ideally become digitised and relevant data values will be fed into an integrated asset model in real-time to enable exception-based asset surveillance and to support critical operational decisions.

Digitising the Wellbore

REMAN Proprietary Inflow tracers allow digitisation of the wellbore as an element in the Digital Oilfield.

Permanently installed chemical tracer systems represent a non-invasive and non-electric technology to provide zonal resolution and hence digitising of the full wellbore. The technology enables trend analysis to identify changes in oil/ water/gas inflow and skin in each zone of the well to support operational decision-making to optimise production at different time scales.

The foundation of the technology is that unique chemical tracers are embedded in a polymetric matrix in the form of plastic rods and installed in appropriate completion components such as a sand screen, ICD screen, tacer carrier pup joint etc. in specific zones of the well. There are three types of tracers being water, oil and gas tracers, these are released from the polymeric matrix when in contact with water, oil and gas respectively. The tracers remain dormant until the polymeric rods are wetted by the target substance. The tracers are transformed from the specific zone in the well-stream to topside in ultralow concentrations.

Plotting data and correlating data is a very powerful analytic and visual technique where human (and potentially artificial) cognition and algorithms can be used and potentially trained to recognise patterns and relates these to changes in zone-specific reservoir l behavior. Often this involves changes in slopes and data anomalies. And so, by correlating changes in production data with changes in tracer concentrations (ng/ml) and tracer fluxes (mg/day) changes in zone-specific behaviors can be interpreted and identified. Such co-trend analysis, diagnostic plotting and pattern recognition represent the foundation of continuous monitoring of the well at zonal resolution.

By providing zonal resolution permanently installed chemical tracers digitise very important elements of the oil field asset – the productive and unproductive zones of the wellbore. This element is important to digitise in a digital oilfield model as the zones are typically around the perforations that represent the fundamental physical connection between the hydrocarbonbearing reservoir and the pathway by which the oil flow to surface.

Following the acquisition of Restrack, RESMAN has expanded its portfolio and harvested synergies from:

• A large number of unique tracers for inflow, interwell and single well tracers

• Chemistry and analytical excellence

• Interpretation excellence

• Global footprint and field experience

RESMAN offers O&G companies well and reservoir surveillance services to optimise production and increase the net present value of the asset by identifying productivity, well events and reduce subsurface uncertainty. This enables operational decision support on well and reservoir management and targeted well operations at zonal resolution.