Optimize Offshore Oil Production Like Never Before
Fablabs AS is a software company that aims to be distruptive about maximizing off-shore oil production, using a holistic Data Science approach and modern technologies, while adhering to time-tested Engineering practices.
Fablabs' business objective is to optimize oil production at a multi-field level by use of a network model that provides near real-time advice to production engineers. It will recommend actions to be taken in the next hours & days to safely increase oil production across one or more fields connected to a single topside processing system. It will also accept hand crafted constraints from an engineer and provide a rapid feed-back loop for evaluating next steps. The possible actions will include shut-ins, start-ups, re-routes to alternate separators, and adjustments to choke and gaslift. The core technologies structure incoming data from a time-series database into a live model that allows for intricate and arbitrary constraints to be placed throughout the network. No two wells is alike, and that needs to be accomodated. The web-based, light-weight user interface belies the powerful engine behind it. Common functions like filtering and user directed investigations are intuitive. Engineers will be able to securely log in from anywhere, 24/7, using any device with a browser.
The Fablabs product, Production Tuner, is timely in this era of low oil prices because it reduces an oil company's reliance on the expensive revolving-door strategy: costly drilling campaigns designed to keep up the quality level of producing wells by trading out older lower producers for newer higher producers. Our solution deeply assesses millions of scenarios and will always find efficient production strategies that lie outside of an engineering teams peripheral vision. And whereas an engineer wants to keep his/her best wells online, our solution will comfortably shut-in some high producers to lay the foundation for a better overall strategy.
Response to the New Normal? Lean and Green
This is a green strategy and is the economically feasible strategy for many operators on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate is now urging oil producers to resist cementing old wells because even older wells represent good business. Fablabs could not agree more. By working smarter oil companies can maximize production through their existing wells and facilities.
A pleasant side effect is that this is green because exploratory drilling itself is such a large source of risk er the environment. Reducing drilling reduces risk. Along with that, the optimizations honors safety margins and government restrictions on the rates of CO2 and H2S production. And it very effectively minimizes the production of water, which must be thoroughly cleaned and returned to the sea. Cleaning water is a key bottleneck and cost in offshore operations. Being green and being economic can be achieved by working smarter rather than harder.
The core users of this product are on-shore production engineers who follow their wells and processes around them. These are the advisors to the people offshore executing the jobs. What they get from this tool is not more alarms, but articulate prompts for action. Production Tuner is a system monitor that identifies inefficiencies and immediately suggests step-by-step strategies that will keep production high. These suggestons are ranked by calculated production gains. It is a system that will be able to listen for changes from sensors and continuously correct its own internal model in response. The recommendations are self-correcting in the way that an in-car navigation system recomputes its best route after a change in traffic conditions, or a missed turn.
This software is web-based, and the oil company can choose how to synchronise production data to Fablabs' secure web application.
The speed alone is compelling. Even if the tool could only match or test proposed actions of the oil company's own production engineers, it would do so in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days. It can mean that engineers show up to the daily morning strategy meeting with an update on where the current problems are offshore as well as a hand picked solution from the tool. This can save much of the morning for every production engineer, every day.