Luis Vargas Rojas, Sensia Global
Employing water injection is a widely utilized method to sustain continual oil recovery from reservoirs. This involves maintaining reservoir pressure, managing the oil rim, and facilitating the movement of oil from injection wells to production wells. Given that many water injection facilities still heavily depend on manual operation, automating the injection process emerges as a crucial strategy.
The technical discussion begins by exploring typical water injection techniques, followed by an analysis of challenges and suboptimal operations in water injection processes within the company and industry. The subsequent focus is on the design of a fully automated water injection system, encompassing considerations such as equipment availability and constraints in aligning with well injection requirements.
While an immediate transition to process automation for mature assets may encounter challenges such as system readiness, limited hardware availability, capital investment, and resistance to mindset change, a novel approach is proposed. This involves implementing guided operation and semi-automatic operation as initial steps, preparing the ground for a comprehensive automation rollout. Shifting from manual reliance to automation enhances the response time to process changes, thereby reducing near-miss and trip incidents and minimizing unplanned deferments in production.