Intelligent and Sustainable Upstream Operations are the Way for the Future

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The oil and gas industry is regarded as the primary source to serve the energy needs on earth till 2040. The upstream phase of operations plays a pivotal role in driving the dependency on providing the required volume of crude and natural gas.

The demand and supply fluctuate over time, especially during pandemic times, but overall, maintaining the ratio is the critical objective for any operator. The traditional way of operations is followed across countries like the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Russia. But there are areas of improvement across these operations which can reduce the downtime and improve the efficiency of operations.

Let us take the example of the world’s largest producer of crude and shale, the United States. In these modern times where most of the industry is moving towards more intelligent automated solutions, oil and gas, especially the upstream operations are still dependent entirely on operators experience to drill an onshore well or improve the production across more than 500,000 acres of field. Even the reliability engineers face the issue of equipment downtime as they tend to follow the scheduled maintenance irrespective of the performance of the equipment. The decisions thus made on experience is effective to about 90% of the time whereas, for the rest 10%, operators or service providers face downtime or non-productive time of the operations due to inefficient operations, leading to losses of millions of dollars.

So, what is that the operators and contractors are looking to fill the gaps in the current way of operations? With a large amount of data collected as part of the operations, operators and contractors are now looking out for a way to utilize the data effectively to generate insights to improve their operations.

Let us take an example of an operator who is managing a very large field consisting of over 100 well pads, 50 surface facilities and producing more than 500 MMscf/d. Just think about the people who will be involved in managing - how hectic will it be for the field engineers and facility managers. It would easily take about a day to investigate the equipment or well causing reduced production at the sales point and contractual obligation for the operator with the midstream operator. Even for a drilling service provider managing more than 500 drilling jobs a year, how difficult will it be for an area manager to identify inefficient drilling operations as even a delay in a drilling job could lead to penalties in thousands of dollars.

These are few points driving E&P companies to move towards a more advanced solution where Artificial Intelligence comes into mind. Many of the companies are not much aware of the potential that AI has in improving day-to-day activities.

There are solutions provided by Flutura that enable E&P companies across the globe to improve equipment uptime, operational efficiency and helps operators reach the ultimate goal of net-zero emissions. Flutura provides a suite of digital assistants or in other words, niche digital solutions to cater to objectives concerning oil and gas operators as well as service providers.

Variety of digital solutions consists of features, for starters, real-time monitoring of the state of operations across the field/network to identify critical bottlenecks, health of the equipment is a fundamental solution that helps E&P companies to identify the critical equipment and operations to take immediate action.

Then moving up the ladder of the digitalization roadmap, operators and contractors prefer to have an automated solution in place which can identify the exact root cause of any event and predict the failure imminent for any equipment, thus reducing manual efforts and time, which can be easily estimated to about 90% based on the current operations strategy.

In the recent times, Flutura is helping the E&P companies with equipment utilization for reduced carbon emissions. Cerebra NetZero is aimed at reducing the Scope 1 & Scope 2 carbon emissions by reflecting changes in the operating processes, assets in use, managing data complexity, supporting changing regulatory environment. The product helps companies track measurable outcomes in terms of GHG emission reductions, cost savings through improved operations, enhanced supply chain partner performance

These are a few of the possibilities which can improve operations, increase the equipment uptime, increase production, and reduce time to action. Overall, hundreds of human hours and millions of dollars can be saved in a sustainable manner, by taking a step towards advanced AI solutions. It’s seen that most of the E&P companies are slowly moving towards the intelligent oil field approach realizing its benefits, thus securing the future of oil and gas operations.