Practical Optimization of Petroleum Production Systems

Burney Waring practiced and studied optimization of oil and gas fields for 29 years, becoming one of Royal Dutch Shell’s top 120 upstream engineering experts before becoming a successful global optimization consultant. He has taught thousands of new and experienced engineers and led a wide variety of global projects and asset reviews. In this book, Burney shares his expertise in capturing hidden value within existing fields with engineers and asset leaders.

Practical Optimization of Petroleum Production Systems is filled with stories of problems and solutions in producing fields, health-checking tools, best-practices, worked examples, tips, and techniques that you can put to use immediately. It also describes proven methods for successful implementation of the Production System Optimization process into any asset or company.

Burney explains to Managers, Reservoir Engineers, Production Engineers and Facility Engineers working for producing assets:
• Where to find the lowest cost production in their field.
• The 4 main steps of the PSO process and the rare and critical 5th step.
• Why your data quality may be very poor and how to improve it.
• Who needs to know the 4 Pillars of Measurement (it’s probably not who you think).
• How to quantify how badly your decisions are hurt by poor data.
• The best approach to getting company resources to improve your data.
• The links between surveillance and value.
• Five methods of surveillance and how to best use them.
• How to get the best surveillance possible with the least work using models.
• Why and how to easily automate surveillance.
• Multiple methods for using visualization in surveillance.
• Why finding 'the optimum' during optimization is the wrong goal.
• The 4 things you need to know before optimizing.
• The best places to find optimization opportunities.
• Two common misunderstandings that often hurt optimization.
• Three simple optimization tools for multi-discipline teams.
• How to best present PSO opportunities for approval and implementation.
• The best methods for look-backs and reviews.
• What will ultimately stop your PSO effort and how to keep it going.
• A methodology to implement better PSO in your team and company.