Bonga is a deepwater field, which lies 120km southwest of Warri in Nigeria at awater depth of 1000m. Bonga started production in November 2005 with sustainedwater injection for pressure maintenance and was the first deepwater project inNigeria. Production Universe which is a state-of-the-art Shell productionmonitoring tool was deployed as part of the Bonga Smart Field's FoundationMark-1 implementation and this has been used for real-time productionmonitoring and optimization. The Smart Fields Foundation project provides theBonga asset with accurate data and models for production surveillance andoptimization.
Real-time production surveillance and optimization has always been a challengeto efficient well and reservoir management in the oil and gas in industry. Conventional method of production monitoring in the oil and gas industry is toline a well through the test separator and acquire the required data. We thenerroneously assume that production from this well(s) remains constant(regardless of the prevailing situation affecting this well) during the periodof interest and we use this rate for monitoring. However, despite the complexnature of well testing in Bonga (with the support of a real-time ‘virtualmeter’ called Production Universe), we have been able to demonstratesignificant improvement in production monitoring and optimisation as shown inthe improved production reconciliation factor between estimated rates fromProduction Universe compared to the actual field production reconciled volumes. Bonga is a field with varying flow rates in the producer wells with very fastresponse to changes in water injection rates.
Hence, accurate production monitoring significantly improved the Bonga fieldWell and Reservoir Management process. The result could be applied to similarassets with the benefit of sustained real-time production monitoring.
