Field Office™ 2011 Software

Weatherford's Field Office 2011 software suite release is designed to help exploration and production companies optimize production from any field-whether conventional or unconventional-with naturally flowing and/or artificially lifted wells. The main objective is to help operators and engineers optimize the asset using real-time data and mathematical simulation models to minimize lifting costs and downtime. A significant increase in interest in shale and heavy-oil assets around the globe has led to many new features in the Field Office 2011 suite to monitor, analyze and optimize production from such assets.

What is new for the 2011 suite?

One key addition to the Field Office 2011 family is the CygNet^® product line. The CygNet enterprise operations platform (EOP) is currently used to monitor more than 250,000 wells in North America, and is now part of Weatherford's real-time integrated production optimization solution. The CygNet SCADA module is comprised of several building blocks, including SCADA functions, protocol drivers, alarm management, security and a robust and efficient historian. CygNet's pipeline module is widely used to monitor transportation of gas throughout North America safely.

The original applications of the Field Office family introduce many new functions. The LOWIS™ real-time production optimization solution now supports optimization of progressing cavity pumping (PCP) and gas-lifted wells. The detailed analysis workbenches of these two lift types will help identify problematic wells through intelligent alarms and assist in running equipment at optimum settings so that production, as well as the life of the equipment, is maximized. Loading of gas wells with liquids is one of the main challenges faced when optimizing wells in shale fields. The newly added deliquification module in LOWIS software monitors gas production as well as liquid loading using real-time engineering calculations. This assists well analysts to take the right remedial actions, including the correct artificial-lift method selection proactively. WellFlo^® software, the artificial-lift design and analysis module of the Field Office suite, now supports plunger lift and jet pumps. Plunger-lift operators now have the ability to use WellFlo software to model gas-well deliquification.

For many assets, full-field real-time optimization-which is based on sub-surface, well and facilities models-is vital as bottlenecks could be present anywhere in the production system. In Field Office 2011, the i-DO^® solution-designed for managing these systems in a real-time environment-is significantly enhanced to help the interdisciplinary team manage complex assets through a collaboration center. Extracting the correct information from various data bases and presenting it in the right form is required for quick and efficient analysis which ultimately augments efficiency of the entire asset-management team-from asset manager to the operator. The new key-performance-indicator (KPI) tracking functionality provides an overview of the asset's performance with one click, while the issue-tracking feature keeps engineers and maintenance crews in synch.

Field Office suite modules include many new features, like the integration of LOWIS and ReO^® software for facilities optimization of electric submersible pumping (ESP) assets, parallel processing technology in the PanMesh™ application to achieve the maximum benefit of multi-core processors and an improved solver in the MatBa^® module.
To handle the diversity involved with collecting real-time data from different assets of various lift types, the Field Office suite uses open standards that ensure existing hardware and software tools are incorporated into the production optimization solution. This suite supports various mechanisms including web services and production markup language (ProdML) for data integration, and object-linking and embedding (OLE) for process controls (OPC^®) to access real-time systems.

Weatherford is committed to providing world-class solutions for maximizing production from any asset while minimizing CAPEX and OPEX. With the release of Field Office 2011, we have achieved another milestone in offering a unified real-time production optimization portal for all artificial-lift types.