By acting on LYTT’s insights, water and oil production levels were ‘tuned’ to optimize production.
Clair Ridge is the second phase of development of the giant Clair field which has an estimated seven billion barrels of hydrocarbons in place.
The field was discovered in 1977, but challenging reservoir characteristics and the technological limits of the time meant it was 2005 before production through the Phase One platform began. Clair Ridge came on stream in 2018.
Such challenges related to well integrity, water inflow, and the complex nature of the fractured subsurface, requiring a highly tailored approach beyond standard operations and data logging methods.
Prad Thiruvenkatanathan, Co-Founder and Chief Product & Technology Officer, LYTT said: “LYTT’s purpose is to empower operators with real-time insights to intelligently manage the risks affecting the productivity of their assets. These efficiency gains are made possible through a comprehensive, dynamic understanding of the production wellbore.
“To support bp’s engineers in driving production, managing integrity and increasing field recovery, we delivered in-depth real-time flow surveillance data by deploying existing fiber optic cables as downhole sensors. LYTT then applied hybrid analytics to generate critical insights into in-well flow dynamics from Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing (DFOS) data in real-time.”
Prad continued: “Our technology gave bp’s engineering team the capability to understand exactly how much water was being produced by the asset, which zones of the well were producing this water and, crucially, when it was being produced. This unparalleled understanding of flow dynamics gave the engineers the insight they needed to ‘tune’ the choke setting of the well to remediate water production while optimizing oil production, as well as where to target a water shut-off intervention.”
Teymur Sadigov, Senior Petroleum Engineer, bp, said: “LYTT’s insights and data enabled us to identify new opportunities which we look forward to applying across our fiber-enabled well stock.”
The details of the successful deployment of LYTT’s real-time, multiphase inflow profiling technology at Clair Ridge were shared at the Society of Petroleum Engineers Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, with the paper now available to download here.
