Integrated production modelling of the Wheatstone-Iago fields: boon or bane?
Applying integrated production modelling (IPM) for decision making in the oil and gas industry has proliferated rapidly, evidenced by the amount of published information about successful applications of this approach. A reason for its popularity is to mitigate the risk of over(under)investment, which is driving asset teams toward jettisoning the practice of using fixed THP to account for backpressure effects or to use the limited surface network options available in most numerical reservoir simulators. This extended abstract describes the modelling of an offshore gas development by coupling multiple full-field, numerical reservoir simulation models with a shared surface network model. Such an approach enabled subsurface elements of the production system to be linked directly to surface elements (subsea and platform) yielding a fully coupled IPM. Key development decisions were tested and justified in a technically rigorous and economically robust manner. These decisions included the phasing of development wells, compression requirements and flow balancing in the pipeline system to maintain specified gas delivery rates. Experience from this approach has shown traditional reservoir engineering techniques can still yield the same outcome as an IPM with comparable accuracy—for some development decisions such as using a creaming curve and fixed THP to determine optimum well count; nevertheless, using simple methods to account for backpressure effects may not allow the same broad-based integration of design requirements needed at the design and engineering stage of large-scale projects. The PowerPoint presentation is not available to APPEA.