Abstract
The article discusses the conducted pilots in TNK-BP brown fields (Vaniegan, Samotlor) with non-intrusive surface ultrasonic sand monitors to optimize ESP lifted oil well regimes in real time. Existing produced solids monitoring practices in TNK-BP consist of regular sampling and require further filtration lab analysis. This process delays immediate corrective action implementation and provides only sporadic values of sand production. Excessive and abrasive sand production has a strong negative impact on runlife of artificial lift equipment and production systems. Today, ESP MTBF for high sand producers is 46 times less compared to analogue data field averages, which results in increased OPEX. The ultrasonic sand monitoring technology was applied to wells with frequent sand related ESP's failures to mitigate performance. Considered fields have up to 5% of such wells in the total amount. The first stage of the technology testing was a learning curve in installation, interpretation and matching outputs with the lab tests. Second stage included various tests in regulating the wells to achieve optimum balance between fluid and sand production using the surface choke and ESP VSD. Optimization of flow rates to control sand production was verified and backed up by sampling and lab analysis with over 103 tests performed within the pilot activity. Observations showed a significant reduction in sand production was achieved in various cases with minimal impact on fluids production with a trend of irregular sand production patterns observed in most of the cases. Because of the large number of wells in the fields, the new and preferred method of installiation is in the automatic group metering unit was proposed and successfully trialed. Detectors accuracy decreases with velocity below 1 m/s. Not all wells had a response to regulation. The areas for further technology development are related to specifics of on-land operations in Siberia. This includes power supply option improvement, absence of wireless data transfer or memory on the sensor for data storage. The method of real time solids monitoring was trialed for the first time in our company. This allowed discovering new opportunities to optimize performance of high sand producers and to scale up the technology to the other TNK-BP fields in the future.
