Abstract
The continuous technology development in different industries and Information Technologies invites opportunities for porting these capabilities to the upstream domain. Also, the goal of increasing overall reservoir performance and operational environment mount higher pressure on the operating companies. Hence, different attempts are made to explore new solutions, optimize processes, and/or introducing new enhancements. One approach is to establish parallelism between the mature industries such as Downstream and Information Technology in pursuit of Intelligent Field Infrastructure (IFI) enhancements. This shall speed up and increase the flexibility in digitizing the oil and gas fields.
The IFI success in delivering intended objectives requires embedded intelligence at all layers; from sub-surface, surface, and to the engineer’s desk top. A model that maps the intelligence for these layers to ensure a coherent end-to-end system is required. The model depends on hardware, software, and integrated data exchanges that may result in new process and/or altering the conventional operation. In this paper, the authors share systematic approach in the concept of technology parallelism and mapping intelligence at each of the IFI layers. The outcomes resulted in actual enhancements by modifying and introducing new capabilities in the IFI infrastructure’s algorithm, hardware and software. This required close collaboration with the different Service Companies. The final outcome resulted in standard feature capabilities part of the standard Saudi Aramco’s IFI solution for Intelligent Field. Case study with empirical data is used in this paper to demonstrate the enhancement outcomes on the overall operation improvements.
