The Issue

In many upstream projects located in hostile environments such as offshore, HPHT, the Arctic, and many others, surface infrastructure constitutes a large percentage of capital and operating expenditure. Consequently, finding the right balance between cost, capacity and development pace becomes a primary profitability driver.

The PetroVR Solution

PetroVR permits you to model surface infrastructure by object names, such as “facilities” and “pipelines.” You can define any number of facilities and connect them by pipelines in any configuration. In addition, there are also a few specialized facilities that allow modeling of other things like water injection, gas injection, gas lift and gas plants.

Figure 1: Example Surface Layout – Define and connect any number of objects in a matter of minutes.

A “facility” is an object that has construction time and cost, fixed and variable operating expenses, capacity constraints, downtime and a few other attributes. So, depending on the desired level of modeling detail, a “facility” can for example be a separator, a process train, a platform or even a processing center.

Figure 2: Facility Type Selection – Intuitive dialogue box makes it simple to add and define facility types.

One particularly powerful feature is the ability to define an “excess policy” for a facility. It allows the user to actively manage the impact of capacity constraints. If no policy is defined, all wells upstream of a facility will simply be choked back with the same percentage. However, the user can apply one or more “excess policies.”

Those include expanding capacity automatically when needed, automatically cloning of facilities to make a new facility when the capacity of the first is reached, prioritizing shut in of wells based on a well parameter (such as high watercut, high GOR, low rate or a user-defined shut-in sequence). The user can also specify that drilling of new wells be deferred automatically until there is spare capacity available to produce them.

Figure 3: Facility Capacity Dialogue

Figure 4: Facility Excess Policy Dialogue – Easily set policies that expand or constrict capacity to actively manage the impact of constraints on your facilities.

The Results

Reduce development optimization time by an order of magnitude
These are some of the capabilities in PetroVR to investigate infrastructure scenarios on any project, from the most simple onshore development to a complex multi-hub. Typically this can be done in a matter of seconds or minutes and ultimately shorten the development optimization process by an order of magnitude.