Saudi Aramco recently inaugurated its first Production Operations Surveillance Hub (POSH) at Ju’aymah Industrial Complex in the Northern Area.
The new hub will augment the onsite monitoring of well site equipment by production engineers at well sites around the Northern Area fields with real-time information from production wells and fields. By centralizing all surveillance in a single hub, will be able to anticipate and respond to problems more quickly, manage its equipment and assets more efficiently, and maintain the reliability of the Kingdom’s hydrocarbon resources.
“By developing and using our own intelligent field technologies, we are not only increasing the reliability of our equipment; we are demonstrating our capacity to be a reliable global supplier of energy,” said Nasir K. Al-Naimi, vice president of Northern Area Oil Operations.
“POSH will provide advanced alerts to production engineers in the field, allowing us to work smarter and use our equipment, resources and people more efficiently and effectively,” said Naji A. Al-Umair, manager of the Northern Area Production Engineering and Well Services Department.
Saudi Aramco was one of the first major oil companies to grasp the significance of intelligent field technologies and deploy them. Seeing the benefits in enhancing operations, the company has deployed intelligent field technology over the past decade in the following ways:
- Smart well completions.
- Permanent downhole monitoring systems.
- Single, dual and multiphase flow meters.
- Pressure and temperature transmitters.
- Fiber optic and wireless data transmission systems.
- Real-time data warehouses and data mining.
Although individual technologies have been deployed at company well sites over the past decade — making it possible to minimize costs and shut-in time during interventions — the industry is still looking for the most effective way to integrate all these technologies into a single solution that can give production engineers the ability to make effective decisions based on real-time data.
This is where a surveillance hub such as POSH can make a significant difference.
How POSH assists production
The POSH team will consist of four surveillance engineers who focus on four key themes:
- Wells and field production management.
- Intelligent field equipment and data health surveillance.
- Electrical submersible pump equipment performance monitoring.
- Field activity tracking and coordination.
POSH engineers can assist production engineers in the field anticipate and react to equipment and other well site issues as they occur.
For example, with the wells and fields production management focus area, well-performance surveillance will be continuous and pre-diagnostics alerts will be generated automatically, giving field teams the information and recommendations they need to apply optimum solutions. This is a vast improvement over the present system.
With the Intelligent Field Data Reliability Application, a surveillance engineer in Ju’aymah can monitor the health of intelligent field equipment and generate key performance indicators about nodes of data and the quality of data.
POSH’s monitoring of electrical submersible pumps tackles day-to-day diagnostics and contributes to achieving target rates by maximizing production and avoiding costly equipment failure.
POSH will also help production departments track and coordinate field activities with a SAP-based enterprise solution that integrates and streamlines business processes for well and field services. Called the Well and Field Automation Project (WAFA), this solution will improve the business planning process, optimize the scheduling of jobs, enhance jobs completion efficiency and maximize the utilization of resources.
