Oil Field Electrification Evolving Distinct Metered Sites to a Utility Scale Grid

Recent industry trends in the unconventional oil and gas production space involve electrification of field activities and the equipment associated with extracting, producing, and transporting oil, gas, and water. Unconventional production plays have always been dispersed across a large area; electrifying existing compression and pumping equipment, as well as introducing newer technologies such as electrified drilling (E-Drill) and hydraulic fracturing (E-Frac) create concentrated mobile and static loads in the range of 0.5 MW to 45MW. Electrifying these geographically diverse assets, that also move around as the field ages, presents unique challenges in the field area from a power system perspective, and externally with the electrical Utility provider. This paper describes a way to overcome these challenges while considering electrifying an active field with a large contiguous acreage footprint of a 300MW operation with potential growth to a design load of 1GW. Issues addressed include steady state power flow with considerations of dynamic system stability leveraging mitigation options of synchronous condensers, Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), Diesel Rotary Uninterruptible Power Supply (DRUPS), static compensators, quantity of utility interconnections, building and operating a grid-scale private use network, and grid management activities.