Abstract
High oil price indeed creates conditions for successful life extension of mature assets. Even old suspended wells could be successfully revived as the watercut threshold for economic production is being changed due to new price situation. Normally, it is uneconomical to build new surface facilities for mature assets, therefore the most critical point for oil production level maximization of such fields is existing infrastructure constrains. The most common constraints are total liquid production and power capacities. These constraints are especially important in case of high watercut wells with medium to high well productivity. The Electrical Submersible Pump is the most widely used artificial lift method for the wells in late development stage. High liquid volume with high watercut leads to considerable power consumption and it turns out pumping equipment as the most significant power consumer. Obviously artificial lift optimization and appropriate management of available power are key enablers for life extension of mature assets. All power consumers in an asset are interconnected; therefore one cannot significantly optimize a field production doing artificial lift system performance optimization for a single well. Valuable optimization only could be achieved using an integrated performance optimization strategy on the whole asset production system and the strategy development is considered in this paper.
The paper presents the value maximization methodology for ESPs driven assets, which consists of optimal well production targets identification and equipment selection & sizing strategy. The key idea of the methodology is to break-down field production system into "capacity" consuming components, understand components behavior and efficiency of power consumption by each component redistribute available capacity between components, targeting maximization of oil production under existing constraints. The paper describes in detail the methodology and provides an example of application.
