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What Data Needs to be Visualized from Wellsites?

What Data Needs to be Visualized from Wellsites?

Wellsites, where oil, gas or geothermal wells are drilled and operated are critical parts of the upstream sector of the oil and gas industry. To operate a safe and efficient wellsite, a wide variety of data is collected to monitor, control and optimize the drilling, completion and production processes.

These intensive data sets are often vast and complex, requiring high-performance charting solutions on WPF, JavaScript, Linux or mobile (iOS/Android) for portable analysis.

In this guide, we’re showcasing how to process your data sets through high-performance visualizations. We’ll explore the options available and help you realize the potential of your oil and gas data dashboards when they’re powered by the right software and support team.

Insightful Data Collection for Oil and Gas Wellsites

From oil field exploration to drilling and production engineering, wellsite data can be broadly categorized into the following groups, all of which can be visualized with charts, tables, and graphs. Data is collected from various sources, including sensors, logs, cores, tests, and reports.

Drilling Data

Drilling data is collected in real-time and collated from various sources, including sensors and logs.

The drilling process requires data on fluid flow, rock mechanics, and well control. This data is designed to help decision-makers make timely decisions for enhanced operational efficiency.

Sensors measure physical parameters, such as pressure, temperature, torque, and vibration, whereas logs record the resistivity, porosity, and density of fluids that come into contact with the drill bit, which is how potential oil reserves, including quality and quantity, are detected.

In oil and gas, it is critical for decision-makers and chart developers to monitor several key metrics to ensure optimal drilling operations:

Drill Bit Depth:

One of the most fundamental parameters is the drill bit depth, which measures the depth of the borehole.

This is typically recorded as both Measured Depth (MD) and True Vertical Depth (TVD), with MD accounting for the total length of the drilled hole and TVD representing the vertical distance from the surface to the bottom of the well. Accurate tracking of these depths is essential for ensuring that drilling remains on target and for planning subsequent wellbore interventions.

Rate of Penetration (ROP):

Another important metric is the Rate of Penetration (ROP), which indicates the speed at which the drill bit advances through the geological formation. ROP is calculated by dividing the distance drilled by the time taken to cover that distance. Monitoring this metric allows operators to evaluate drilling efficiency, detect potential formation changes, and make informed decisions about bit selection and drilling parameters.

Drilling Mud Properties:

Drilling mud properties maintain wellbore stability and optimize drilling performance. Whether using oil-based, water-based, or synthetic muds, operators must monitor several key properties, including weight, viscosity, and flow rate. Additionally, other factors such as density, torque, and drag provide insight into the forces acting on the drill string and the resistance encountered during drilling. Effective management of these mud properties helps prevent issues such as wellbore collapse or stuck pipe incidents.

Drill Bit Position and Orientation:

The drill bit’s position and orientation are also vital to track. This includes monitoring the inclination, azimuth angle, and tool face orientation, which ensures the bit remains aligned with the planned well trajectory. Precise control over these variables is necessary for directional drilling operations, allowing operators to steer the wellbore accurately through the subsurface formation.

Hook Load:

In addition, the hook load, or the weight supported by the drilling rig, is another important parameter to monitor. By continuously tracking hook load, operators can detect abnormal weight changes that might indicate drilling issues, such as excessive drag or downhole equipment malfunction.

Case and Cementing Data:

Monitoring casing and cementing operations ensures the integrity of the well. This involves tracking cementing pressures and volumes during the process, as well as keeping records of casing operations. Accurate data on these operations ensures the well is properly sealed, preventing fluid migration between formation layers and maintaining safety throughout the well’s lifecycle.

Formation Evaluation Data

Formation evaluation data helps to confirm the presence of reservoir rock, evaluate hydrocarbons, estimate their volume, and develop models of rock mechanical properties for drilling and production purposes.

This data is collected using core and fluid laboratory measurements, well logs, and other techniques to help interpret subsurface formations.

The main metrics include Logging While Drilling (LWD) and Measurement While Drilling (MWD). This shows data on formation properties such as resistivity, porosity, gamma rays, density and neutron porosity.

Wireline logs also include detailed measurements collected post-drilling, including sonic logs, resistivity, density and neutron logs.

Completion Perforation & Fracturing Data

Perforation involves creating tunnels through the cemented casing and surrounding rock to connect the wellbore to the reservoir, allowing fluids to flow. The characteristics of these tunnels, such as depth, tunnel clean-up, entrance hole, and pressure balance, are vital to production performance. Choosing the right perforation system and technique is crucial, as improper selection can affect production rates.

The completion perforation and fracturing data will include information on various aspects of the process. This will cover the locations and depths of the perforations, along with the number of perforations made in the casing to allow reservoir access. Additionally, data on the pressure, rate, and volume of fracturing fluids and proppants used will be recorded. Both wellhead and downhole pressure will be monitored throughout the completion process to ensure accurate pressure tracking.

Production Data

Production data refers to the flow rates of fluids from individual wells and the reservoir, including cumulative production, gas-oil ratio, and water cut over time.

By analyzing production data, reservoir engineers can use techniques like decline curve analysis to determine economic limits, predict the need for enhanced recovery techniques, and estimate when a reservoir will be abandoned. It is one of the most important tools for understanding and predicting reservoir behavior.

Regular analysis of daily production data is crucial for identifying issues such as increased water or gas production, which could signal reservoir changes.

Metrics to monitor include flow rates of oil, gas and water, which are typically measured in barrels per day (BPD) or standard cubic feet per day (SCFD).

Surface pressure at the wellhead is captured during ongoing production, alongside surface and downhole temperatures to monitor flow impact and equipment performance.

Fluid composition and artificial lift data to measure pump performance, power consumption and efficiency as part of an HMI/SCADA interface.

Realtime Data

Realtime data creates ongoing alerts and notifications to prevent issues such as stuck pipes or fluid loss. By monitoring parameters like well pressure, fluid rates, and cementing processes, this data can enhance decision-making, reduce risks, and boost efficiency.

Collecting telemetry data for continuous streaming of data to a remote operations center, enables situational analysis and real-time decision-making or alarm systems. Fiber optic cable systems are also applied for Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) or Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS).

Safety and Environmental Data

Safety and environmental data are required to monitor compliance, health and safety, and reduce the risk of avoidable performance outages on the wellsite. Examples include blowout preventer status to prevent blowouts, spill and leakage monitoring, as well as emissions monitoring in the case of flaring or venting.

Operational Data

Test data from wellsite devices, logs and cost tracking can all be combined to generate reports that highlight the financial and performance metrics of the wellsite.

Why is it Important to Collect this Data?

Without the right data on a wellsite, your decision-makers won’t be able to identify and resolve potential problems that could impact productivity, bottom line and return on investment. By closely monitoring these parameters—drill bit data, wireline logs, flow and pressure rates of fluids and gas, and telemetry data—decision-makers can optimize drilling performance, enhance wellsite safety, and improve overall operational efficiency.

Identify Patterns, Correlations and Trends

Data collected from sensors can help identify potential issues with your wellsite before they impact production. Parallel coordinate plots can also be done to analyse global data sets for insights. Your data analysis team can assess and report to decision-makers. They can then assign proactive repair work or precautionary investigations to check if work needs to be carried out. This can help eliminate the risks and costs of maintenance. Being able to make forecasts, such as for multiphase flow pressure, supports operational efficiency.

SciChart WPF chart example parallel coordinate plot

Improved Communication and More Informed Decision-Making

With more of the right data being processed quickly and in a way that maintains accuracy, this speeds up interpretation and improves shared understanding between investors, stakeholders, regulators and the public. Importantly, this contributes to better decision-making.

Increase Operational and Cost-Efficiency and Maximise Cumulative Extraction

Data that’s collected should be geared towards exceeding the productivity levels of your competitors and always striving for greater efficiency. This can be achieved by collecting data from inflow control devices (ICD) or inflow control valves (ICV) as well as downhole sensor systems. This is especially important for mature oil fields where water production hampers profitability.

How Much Data Does the Average Oil Company Collect?

Data volumes can easily exceed 10 TB of data per day—and that’s per well. There is a push for data to be consumed and interpreted faster to aid decision-making processes. These are integral for helping current wellsites perform at their optimal capacity and ensure new ventures are scoped. However, with the fast-data mindset comes the issue of potentially compromising on the quality.

That’s why it’s important to collect the right data in the right way and process it with software that’s built to handle masses of complex data. You want to collect data that enhances insights.

Advanced Data Analytics: Data Mining vs. Deep Learning

How data collection is approached and processed is just as important as the information that you collect. There are various advanced analytical data approaches, including deep learning and data mining, that are worth exploring.

Data mining identifies patterns and similar groups in data, as well as highlighting anomalies. It uses rules of correlation and association to alert decision-makers of data points they should monitor or take action from. This is a common approach used in day-to-day wellsite data collection and analysis.

However, for more complex problem processing, the deep learning method may need to be applied. For example, ExxonMobil used the deep learning approach to process huge amounts of global data.

Building a parallel coordinate plot allowed them to determine recurring themes within their data. Leveraging deep learning tools, they were able to visualize large data sets to obtain more advanced insights, including searching for new wellsite opportunities.

The Right Data Needs the Right Software

SciChart is a cross-platform charting software that supports high-performance big data analytics. In short, we ensure accuracy, speed and reliability of your data processing. With responsive developer support and consultancy services available from expert chart developers that have worked with the likes of ExxonMobil, you won’t find a better software solution provider for your big data requirements. You want to push the boundaries of what’s possible and maintain operational and cost-efficiency. Let our charts and team support you with your goals to help you grow your bottom line.

By Sheldon Vestey | Oct 04, 2024
Chief Commercial Officer at SciChart, with a background in Biochemistry & Genetics and serving as a Government Scientific Grant Assessor. Focuses on business development, building key partnerships, advancing customer innovations, leading educational programs, and managing reseller networks.

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