Production Engineers own the crucial role of monitoring and evaluating the productivity and efficiency of an oil and gas well. They’re the driving leaders in an oil and gas company that bring departments together to ensure profitable wells. “If you apply even low amounts of effort toward effective engineering habits, such as using tools to help you iterate and validate ideas more quickly, you can earn tremendous dividends.” Edmond Lau author of The Effective Engineer. Through analytic and workflow tools, successful Engineers access data in a consistent and structured manner that catalyze valuable conversations. Learn how leading production engineers are utilizing technology to efficiently use their time and make the best decisions to run profitable wells.
1. Efficiently view well performance.
Be productive with analytic solutions to view information anywhere, anytime. Spend less time searching for well productivity and more time making intelligent, timely decisions for the best business impact. Start your day by viewing downtime reports that are managed by exception and review the largest variance wells very quickly.
2. Have visibility into costs.
Drill down to any invoice to review accuracy and correct any misallocations. Ensure that each well is being billed for the right set of work and costs. A Production Engineer from a large Permian Basin Operator diverted a large production cost by using an advanced LOE analytics solution, “Post deployment, we caught a few overcharges that we wouldn’t have caught if we didn’t have the dashboards. It resulted in about $40K of invoices credited back to us”. With fast and easy access to invoices in the field, personnel can quickly review costs against wells to ensure they are correct which assists in increasing profits from wells.
3. Perform well downtime reviews daily.
Use advanced downtime tools that allow time to focus on reducing downtime and maximizing revenues, versus spending hours and weeks gathering and cleansing data. With the ability to see downtime categories and sub-categories you’re able to choose downtime reasons to go after, based on production loss. Only then can you make actionable insights to improve downtime performance of a single well. A Production Engineer from a large Permian Basin Operator saw a definite trend down in most cost codes of 5-10% and contributed at least a part of that to the tracking ability provided by analytics solutions.
4. Analyze and compare well production with the office and your lease operators.
Use analytics solutions to access real-time, detailed data about costs, production, and profitability. When the office and field are viewing the same insights, Production Engineers can facilitate more production conversations to guide Lease Operators and make effective decisions in the field. With everyone looking at the same data and plots, everyone speaks the same language to make effective operating decisions. There is reason to work in absolutes - worked in absolutes; keep the well open, or shut the well in. Involve more people in creating decision scenarios around what to do if oil prices reach a certain point, or how best to mitigate under performing wells.
5. Ensure data integrity.
Visibility is key to acquire and maintain clean data. Without being able to review your data you can’t find discrepancies to correct. Make the clean-up simple and easy with straightforward graphics in an organized format. One IT Director at a mid size E&P says it best: “Visibility cures a lot of evils in data integrity. Prior to upgrading our technology, field data would be massaged for 2-3 days, then it would go to an analytics engine and there was no ownership in data. With our new field data capture solution, there was near real time visibility. Our COO found 13 mmboe of salt water from a single well which isn’t possible and we discovered the data quality issues very quickly”.
Strong and trustworthy data visibility allows production engineers to be leaders in their organization to make real-time decisions, driving efficiency. By utilizing technology and focusing on collaboration, companies can view the same reports, improve field operations, and reduce the cost of compliance.