Boyne Grainger, Consulting Engineer
During 1969, Getty Oil Company, which has since become part of Texaco, Inc., initiated a massive field automation program in it's Kern River Oilfield in California. The result was the SCAN system, or Sampling, Control and Alarm Network, which can be credited with supplying most of the field data and operating information necessary for the successful transformation of that 70 year old oilfield from a daily oil production of 45,000 barrels to a maximum of over 100,000 barrels per day. The system is still in full operation and has since been expanded to service 4600 wells instead of the 2200 wells connected at its inception. SCAN as an operating system has been well reported in prior literature (See ref.) so only a brief functional description is given here. This paper limits its scope to a portion of the system rarely touched upon by system analysts, the field-end hardware components which supply well data to the SCAN computer center. Especial attention is given to the individual well flow sensors, often referred to as flow/no-flow switches. These devices are worthy of special examination because they supply a stream of data which is of surprising importance to both engineering and operating groups. Their selection and application problems are also pretty typical of those encountered with other items of data producing hardware.