Production Optimization through Operate by Priority: The Development and Deployment of Downtime Advisory System to Permian Wells

Abstract High-well-count Permian Basin (Permian) assets pose unique challenges in daily production operations. With hundreds of wells under the oversight of a single production engineer and a limited number of lease operators, it is very hard to accurately track a well's production uptime. In the Permian, large variances have been observed in day-to-day production volume (oil, water, gas) balances due to unrecorded downtime. Volume losses attributed to events such as liquid loading, gas lift underperformance, choking and offset frac'-hits are usually not reported. These challenges make it difficult to identify production optimization opportunities and to have confidence in allocated production datasets. This paper describes a downtime advisory system (DTAS) that utilizes data analytics and rule-based algorithms to automatically detect well production downtime. DTAS reports non-producing wells daily to the operation teams and populates a priority list with impacted volumes in order to facilitate investigation of production impacting events and ultimately achieve production uplift. DTAS has been deployed to more than 2,500 ExxonMobil operated wells in the Permian with recommendations on daily well production downtime. DTAS identified additional production loss that was previously unrecorded, which was translated into opportunities that helped improve production optimization and allocations. The automated system has saved field personnel significant time by reducing time-on-tools and facilitating root cause diagnosis. This has enabled production engineers to focus on production uplift and achieve operational efficiency by priority.