WellSavvy™ Artificial Lift Real-Time Diagnostic Software

Technology in the oil and gas industry has been growing at an exponential rate for decades. Recent trends have job-specific computer programs replacing manual calculations and spreadsheets for analysis. However, with the proliferation of real-time data monitoring systems, large amounts of data can be overwhelming to use. As real-time data monitoring expands in detail and purpose, operators find the need to properly store, organize, and analyze large amounts of data in an effective way.

Merely adding more analysis programs does not provide what well engineers need to operate more effectively. They require an optimization tool to accelerate what they do best–performing a detailed analysis of wells in a reasonable time using all available data. That is where WellSavvy software is invaluable. It offers the ability to identify non-obvious trends in large amounts of data based on prior observations–much like a production optimization expert would do in real life. The result is hundreds or even thousands of wells analyzed accurately in seconds, even when data is incomplete or partially inaccurate.

How Does It Work?

In the gas-lift domain, production data is used to carry out optimization at three levels:

• Well-by-well, detecting downhole problems
• Field-wide, calculations of optimum lift gas allocation to a group of gas-lifted wells
• Real-time, where the calculated optimum allocations are fed back into the control system for lift gas set points for each well

Of the three methods described above, well-by-well optimization generally provides the greatest benefit for the least amount of cost. WellSavvy software places most of its emphasis there using real-time and historical data to derive problem solving scenarios and their relative probable accuracy.

WellSavvy software is built on a principal of Digital Engineers, which perceive and act on environmental conditions. It is autonomous in its behavior in that extensive calculations and analysis can be done without human intervention. That means that an entire field’s wells can be analyzed overnight and ready for morning evaluations. The program partially depends on the scenarios occurring in the fields which means it can be trained for unique well conditions. It focuses on well-by-well optimization and performs the following tasks:

• Continuously monitors wells
• Diagnoses problems in the artificial lift system
• Recommends courses of actions to confirm or correct the problem
• Explains the recommendations with information consistent with a gas-lift expert’s “mental model” for problem solving

The knowledge base incorporates various data and analyzes them in a very organized way. The result is a system that processes the data much like an engineer would. The difference is the WellSavvy application can do the analysis much faster.