American Oil and Gas Reporter - August 2015 - 98

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98 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

one of the key driving factors behind
wireless technology's adoption is the fact
that it costs 30 percent less on average
than wired solutions. In addition, wireless
equipment is portable, allowing it to be
moved on or off location at almost no
cost.

Critical Considerations
With production companies seeking
to maintain and optimize production, both
the cost and efficiency of the remote sensing equipment used to automate operations
are becoming critical considerations. Automation in the oil and gas industry started
as a way to report gas flows and tank
fluid levels, with early automation systems
providing "report only" functionality. Today, integrated automation systems include
monitoring, reporting, control and builtin fail safe capabilities.
Most automated production facilities
rely on automated emergency shut down
(ESD) systems, cry-out-by-exception
alarms, and much smarter and more memory-intensive intelligent devices such as
PLCs and RTUs. The purpose of incorporating wired or wireless automation
into oil and gas operations is to enhance
bottom-line economics by increasing life
cycle productivity, reducing installation
costs, improving quality or the predictability of quality, improving the robustness
of production processes, reducing human
labor and intervention, and mitigating
safety and environmental risks.
Similar to the evolution of wired to
wireless control systems, capital cost and
operating expense are dominant factors
in the development of automation technology, but almost equally important is
the time to implement data analysis. Reducing wait times from weeks to days or
hours means operators can receive data
sooner, and start to plot trends and cycles
earlier in the production process to analyze
performance and optimize production
from the first day a well comes on line.
Having accurate, timely information that
can be implemented quickly and economically allows operators to take preemptive steps to identify issues, prevent
problems and enhance production operations.
These new operational capabilities reflect the evolving concepts of big data
and the fully digital oil field. It is estimated
that 50 percent of all oil and gas production
companies will have the ability to perform
predictive analysis within the next year.
Already, the industry has migrated from
100 percent wired solutions to the point
where 50 percent of all supervisory control
and data acquisition system installations
use wireless technology, and the trend to
wireless solutions continues to accelerate

rapidly.

Custody Transfer
The well pad and the associated production facilities represent the first and
primary focal point in the process of optimizing field operations. The second
point is custody transfer, where remote
sensors and data acquisition have become
equally critical. The challenges in custody
transfer operations break into four separate,
but related issues: preventing spills, preventing theft, reporting accurate inventory
levels, and accurately measuring sales
volumes.
The challenges are complicated because
changes in production rates from pads in
unconventional plays can cause operators
to have insufficient or excess separation
and tank storage, inefficient compression,
and other capacity issues on wells that
could be better utilized on other pads.
With the advent of multiwell pads, production locations have more or less become processing plants. Large volumes
of oil and gas are being produced, treated,
stored and transferred. As the product
moves away from the pad location, the
challenge shifts from optimizing production to optimizing the accountability and
accuracy of the sales.
In U.S. unconventional resource plays,
leading producers such as Apache, Pioneer
Natural Resources, BHP Billiton,
Anadarko, Statoil and Range Resources
have led the way with information technology-driven data solutions. Smaller
companies traditionally have been slower
to adopt automation and optimization
technologies, but that trend clearly has
reversed. Smaller operators are installing
remote sensors on well and pad locations
to allow them to better analyze production
data today, as well as to implement predictive analysis and optimization efforts
in the future.

HS&E Issues
An additional critical driver in the
industry's move to digital oil field technology is health, safety and environmental
compliance. In areas where hydrogen
sulfide is an operational hazard, most
companies have enacted policies to prohibit employees or contractors from hand
gauging tanks or even going up the stairs
to the "catwalk" on storage tanks.
Installing sensors on these sites introduces risk and requires crews to be trained
and certified in H2S safety. Many producers are seeking to protect their employees and mitigate operational risk by
adopting wireless technologies that can
be installed fully in 30 minutes per tank
by one man as opposed to two days for a

American Oil and Gas Reporter - August 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Oil and Gas Reporter - August 2015