Newfoundland

I had a visit to Newfoundland this week.  St. John's is a nice town, with a port, right on the North Atlantic.

Port of  St. John's

I got a walk from the hotel every day, past some very nice restaurants--surprisingly nice considering that St. John's is literally at the end of the earth.  

Water street, St. John's, NFL, CA

If you get to go there try Portobello's (http://www.portobellosrestaurant.ca/) which was truly excellent.


Here is my quintessential Canadian photo...

Hockey after work!

...walking to work in the morning, carrying the hockey mask and skates.  At the airport some girls were trying to get through the revolving door with hockey sticks laid horizontally across their cart.  Hockey, eh?

My client had a variety of areas that they wanted me to review, including well testing, production allocation, production system optimization, and integrated production system modelling.  They have a nice set of tools there including FlowManager (FMC) software, sold as a "Virtual Flow Metering System".  The system is necessary for this client because the wells have to be tested at much different back pressures than the system to which they normally produce.  

This was my first exposure to Flow Manager.  If you are not familiar with this tool, it is a physical model running attached to a real-time system.  The idea is to run the model with a known rate from a good welltest and calibrate the model using typical flow correlation values like friction and gravity coefficients, then have the program estimate the rates in real-time using the pressures and temperatures in the system.  FlowManager did appear to take quite a bit of work to keep calibrated, and the client is working hard to get the Flowmanager models calibrated with a new set of high-quality data.   

The client had a Petroleum Experts, Ltd. IPM model that had fallen into disuse.  I selected the PE5 model from Petex which worked OK without matching, and re-ran all the lift curves with a better spacing of liquid rates.  After that, we were able to get the GAP model calibrated again to a good set of relatively recent data and start using the model for optimizing in a number of different well routing and gas lift distribution scenarios.  The IPM model will be useful for weekly production planning and daily production optimization.

I was able to leave them a report with instructions for simple calibration of the model with a new set of data, using the model to optimize against constraints, and archiving and sharing the model.  I also gave them suggestion for improving their allocation and welltesting processes, as well as mentoring, and general teamwork.