Publications

Major capital projects (such as the Minas Surfactant Project) require reliable real-time surveillance - especially production-injection surveillance - to ensure project objectives are met. Superior surveillance increases the capability of the project team to monitor reservoir drift, ensure reservoir connectivity, achieve injection and production design rate and pressure, and characterize reservoir basic parameters, such as permeability and skin to update the reservoir simulation model. Furthermore, real-time surveillance helps to match available surveillance data obtained from tracer, core and well logs to actual production-injection data. A successful surveillance system, enabling alignment of the results of all available surveillance, then integrating them into reservoir models, may reduce project risk and uncertainty. An installed surveillance system should be able to monitor real-time data of downhole pressure, surface pressure and injection rates as well as production rates. A field device connected to the cable and fiber optic to the main database system is installed, so that operators and engineers are able to monitor, download and analyze surveillance data from virtually anywhere and from any format. Then, the well data is also available to be analyzed, using various tools, such as welltesting and simulation software. Using online surveillance monitoring, reservoir connectivity can be directly shown, confirming the project teams area selection. The impact of outside pattern activities that may affect pattern performance (such as well shut off and workover) can also be vividly seen. Some phenomena that were not anticipated, such as dynamic reservoir pressure, were observed. Reservoir drift as one of the uncertainties of the project is also confirmed, but the drift magnitude was corrected, resulting in a correction on injection and production rates, to ensure the project yields an acceptable tracer job recovery factor. The understanding of the reservoir pressure behavior was improved, as the simulation shows the pressure history match. Combined with other surveillance tools (such as a tracer), online monitoring should ensure project success and smoother execution. The greatest benefit of a realtime surveillance system is allowing the project team to react sooner rather than later and ensure an appropriate and rapid response is undertaken.