Digital Management of Oil & Gas Production: from Planning to Practical Application

Sochi hosted the 9th International Scientific and Practical Conference "Smart Field: Innovative Technologies from Reservoir to Pipeline." The respected industry platform is part of the Black Sea Oil and Gas Conferences project aiming to share experience in digital management of production based on data analytics. The ITPS experts, together with Gazpromneft-Vostok, presented the unique expertise of Integrated Modelling (IM) technology application at the fields with high gas ratio and moderated a round table that focused on sharing practical experience in upstream asset digitalization.

Most of the reports were devoted to the development and application of integrated models as the primary tool for analytics and management of production processes. The critical question which interested the conference participants was how to ensure the implementation of the plans at the fields with complex geological structures and with many factors hampering the development. The ITPS experts offered a practical solution to this problem during the implementation of the project on the creation of a digital twin of the Urmano-Archinskaya group of fields, developed by Gazpromneft-Vostok. Today this tool helps the experts of the company's Production Management Center to make forecast calculations and work out the most feasible production scenarios.

As an example of a successful IM application, Anton Ovchinnikov, Head of the Integrated Modeling Department at ITPS, presented the calculations of the estimation of new wells commissioning and startup of the stock stopped due to gas production limitation at the Archinskoye field. The digital twin indicates which section will have the tremendous increase in linear pressure and what changes in indicators the launch of new wells will lead to, considering their mutual influence.

"The key objective of creating digital twins is to increase the economic efficiency of all activities performed or planned at the field. Any current asset involves huge amounts of data, a multitude of interrelated processes and factors, technological and organizational, that affect production levels in one way or another. Every event, every change in technological modes in the production chain, inevitably leads to a result that can be quantified in money. Therefore, all oil & gas companies strive to build their processes of performing scenario calculations and high-precision forecasting. No doubt, such companies have a stronger chance to become market leaders because they possess an information base for making the correct managerial decisions," pointed out the expert.

Anton Ovchinnikov was also one of the moderators of the round table titled ‘Digital Field – Prompt Managerial Decision-Making at All Stages of Exploration and Development.’ The round table was dedicated to such topics as the specifics of organizational changes related to the implementation of new tools, the complexity of assessing the business effects of implementing systems that directly impact performance indicators, and import substitution in IT. The emphasis was placed on the fact that today the business needs define the direction of the information solutions development.