Decision Support for Petroleum Production Optimization

In 2007 the IO Center was founded. It is a SFI consortium, now containing 14 industry partners and three research partners. Since its start, substantial amount of research results in the field of production optimization and reservoir management has been a ccumulated. Solution Seeker AS was established as a Spin-off company from the IO Center in February 2013 with the intention to bring the most promising results into the commercial arena. Solution Seeker AS will provide a decision support solution to oil companies, a tool for daily production optimization with the aim to increase the utilization of oil and gas production systems by e.g. increasing oil throughput. The contribution from this tools, and hence also the challenges, can be divided in two. Th e first challenge is related to accessibility and quality of data. Software solution and or sensors that can identify or help estimate the current state of the system with acceptable accuracy real-time, are very valuable to the engineers and operators. Th e second challenge is related to improvement. The greatest value of knowing the details of the current state of the production system is that it acts as a platform for improvement. Knowing how a change in a wells choke valve, a change in gas lift distribu tion or re-routing between wells affects the system bottlenecks and back pressure on other wells is crucial to optimize performance. The decision support tool Solution Seeker AS will provide combines a new method for well and production system monitorin g with a special purpose optimization technique. Solution Seeker AS will act as a vendor to the oil companies, when installing the decision support package on an asset. It is also possible to act as a subcontractor for one of the larger software provider. The main goal of this pre-project is to develop a strong IPN application to The Research Council of Norway in which LOIs from 2-3 potential industry partners will be a key factor.