Abstract

This project extended the efforts begun as part of the SPE Digital Energy Conference Workshop on “Real Time Optimization Workflows in Production Operations and their Impact on IT Integration”. The workshop was held at the Westchase Marriott Hotel on May 19th, 2008 for half a day with the following objectives:

  1. Challenge the participants to think from a workflow perspective, how it enables the business, and quantify the value of its implementation.
  2. The start of a library of use cases/reference workflows in the upstream industry.
  3. A white paper that describes the business processes and identified workflows.

A project charter document was prepared by: Yanni Charalambous – chair of SPE’s IT Technical Section Oilfield Integration (ITTS–OI) and Kemal Farid - chair of SPE’s Real-Time Optimization Technical Interest Group (RTO-TIG), and Jack Christiansen, Deniz Gurkan, and Jami Kovach of the College of Technology (COT) at the University of Houston. This document is included in the Appendix A.

The goals of the project (as outlined in the project charter) include the following:

  1. Develop a standard use case format to document workflows.
  2. Document Digital Energy workshop content within the standard use case format for the selected workflow.
  3. Review workshop results with subject matter experts (SMEs) at Oil & Gas companies.
  4. Document notes from meetings with SMEs at Oil & Gas companies.
  5. Develop and document the selected use case based on feedback from SMEs.
  6. Analyze the business case in terms of the economic impact of the workflow.
  7. Evaluate the use of a semantic web (ontology) to capture the workflow and use case.
  8. Publish the results to the SPE ITTS-OI and RTO-TIG team site and in other SPE venues.

The project team selected “Joint Venture Production Reporting” (JVPR) as the workflow to be documented in this project. The recommendations of the ITTS-OI and RTO-TIG teams were based on the criteria: “had to be solvable, in a reasonable time frame, had to be relevant to a majority of Operators, and had to deliver bang for buck” [1]. The greatest opportunities for improvement of the use case were at the reconciliation phase of JVR where (i) estimated expense checks paid by Partners would not cover the Operator’s production costs because of not being linked to physical operational events; (ii) opportunities for creative solutions to problems are missed because of lack of real-time communication of production data between Partners/Operators/both; and (iii) suffering from avoidable penalties due to reporting irregularities. These simple problems were outlined on a slide [1] as included in Figure 1.

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Figure 1. Use case “Joint Venture Reporting” and its potential problems as outlined at the workshop [1].

This report is the culmination of all knowledge gathered in line with the project deliverables. The report is organized as follows: Background information on Joint Venture Reporting is provided to set the tone for this report and establish the scope for this project. An executive summary outlines the main findings of this project. These findings are elaborated in detail in the following sections, which refer to the deliverables of the project. First, the results of our efforts to document the JVPR workflows are presented. This work includes sequence diagrams that depict the information exchanged and the modes of communication utilized within JVPR operations. The next section summarizes the analysis conducted to examine issues/problems currently faced within JVPR and developed recommendations and potential solutions to address the issues/problems faced. Then the report details the process utilized to achieve our results. First, a standard use case format is presented to document workflows. Then, the documentation of the 2008 SPE Digital Energy workshop content is provided. The notes from SME meetings on workshop results are outlined and summarized in the next section, along with all documentation of SME meeting notes.

Bibliography
1. Outlined in “Explanation of the Real Time Optimization Use Case survey process” presentation given by Yanni Charalambous, Shaun Wright & Jim Browne during the workshop on May 19th, 2008.
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