SPE – GCS Completion and Production Study Group

Author: Derek Mathieson, President and CEO, WellDynamics

Petroleum engineers have moved beyond experimenting with intelligent well completions to applying the technology as an integral part of their active reservoir management strategies. As the industry migrates to even broader application of intelligent completion technology – focusing on field-wide, rather than well-specific, deployment of these tools to enable the realization of operating philosophies – several factors will impact success. In the Gulf of Mexico, those factors include the following:

• Extremely high rig rates that demand that the completion be done right the first time
• Subsea control systems that must interface and work reliably with surface and downhole systems
• Basins that are extremely deep and characterized by high pressure.

This presentation will discuss those factors, as well as others that influence the widespread use of intelligent completions in field-wide solutions, including the following:

• Modeling “up front” to test the proposed intelligent solution under different reservoir or production conditions
• Integrating and managing a multitude of interfaces with other completion technologies and surface infrastructures
• Delivering information in the correct engineering units and to the right people so that decisions can be made quickly and accurately
• Delivering significant economic results through an agreed system operating philosophy

The presentation concludes with a look into the near future, where exciting new developments are ongoing in the area of cableless systems and reservoir monitoring solutions.