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Flow control
Enhancing oil recovery with process control applications
Increasing demand for energy and the disappearance of socalled easy oil, oil that is relatively easy to extract, are driving oil producers to develop ever more innovative technology. Automatic process control technology can help to achieve production efficiencies. Already extensively used downstream to help optimise refinery processes, process control can automatically handle operational variations and upsets, and thus help to optimise oil production.
Shell and its associates are jointly developing process control technologies to help solve specific oil and gas production challenges. Shell’s joint-venture collaborator Petroleum Development Oman has innovated two such applications. One is a gas breakthrough control algorithm based on Shell Global Solutions’ cone control technique. This algorithm has been applied on several difficult-to-operate, remote wells to enable continuous operation at optimum production.
The algorithm is used on wells that produce from thin-oil-rim, fractured reservoirs with a gas cap. In certain circumstances, lifting the oil causes gas breakthrough (excessive amounts of free gas gain access to the well and flow to surface). To manually determine the choke position that produces minimal gas is difficult and labour intensive. In extreme cases of gas breakthrough, the well is operated in what is called stopcock mode: close the choke valve, wait until oil collects and then open the valve. This results in periods of production alternating with periods when the well is closed-in.