American Oil and Gas Reporter - October 2017 - 44

SpecialReport: Oil Field Chemistry
To achieve this goal most cost-effectively, operators have
three primary areas on which to focus optimization efforts:
chemicals, manpower and failure rate costs. While many
advanced chemistries are available to help operators improve
well performance, some of the greatest optimization opportunities
for oil and gas companies are in the manpower and failure prevention areas, Durham contends.
"It takes a lot of personnel both on the operator's side and
the vendor's side to supply and apply production chemicals," he
says. Consequently, oil field automation is key to optimizing
chemical programs. "Technology is making it cost-effective to
automate even mature assets to remotely monitor and control
pumps, tanks, sensors and other production equipment-including
chemical injection and metering," he explains. "Instead of
spending time and money driving around 'finding and figuring,'
pumpers can focus on 'fixing' any chemical-related issues."
In a field with 2,000 wells, Durham estimates that 10-20
percent of chemical pumps and stream flushes require calibration
or repair at any given time. The challenge for traditional
monitoring is that field personnel must physically travel to each
well to inspect it. "If the wells are spread out over hundreds of
miles, it takes a lot of people to do proper surveillance," says
Durham. "Monitoring wells remotely allows the pumper to
quickly determine which wells he needs to actually visit."
While production chemicals are required on virtually all
wells, they are vital to the performance of mature assets, which
represent the vast majority of all producing wells, Durham
notes. Many have low oil and gas production rates, high water
cuts, and scaling, asphaltene and other challenges.
Reducing Costs And Risks
As automation and connectivity costs come down with the
advent of digital solutions, Durham says the technology becomes
a viable alternative to traditional treater truck-based well maintenance routines, for example. "These low-cost automation
tools are not perfect yet, but they are evolving quickly and
getting better all the time. Anytime you can take a truck off the
road that would be hauling chemicals or produced water, you

have reduced cost and risk."
Durham notes that automation also often improves the cost
effectiveness and performance of chemicals treatments. "The
frequency of treatment schedules and the amount of chemicals
can be tailored to the conditions of each well, and continuous
automated treatments also can reduce deferred production
caused by dips between infrequent batch treatments," he points
out. "It does not take many failures with traditional periodic
surveillance to justify moving to an automated system."
As hardware and software costs continue to drop, Durham
predicts that most wells will be able to be equipped with
automated treatment with no additional cost to existing chemical
programs. In fact, he says operators will be able to reduce
chemical spending in many cases while also enhancing the effectiveness of their treating programs to eliminate common
problems that can lead to production downtime.
Automation and connectivity are already the new norm in
horizontal resource plays. "These wells cost millions of dollars
to drill and complete, so a small incremental investment in
chemical automation is an easy decision," Durham says. "Wells
can be remotely treated in batch or with continuous automated
injection to optimize production, balancing deferred production
with chemical costs."
Once automated, wells can be monitored remotely in real
time and visits scheduled only when a fix or adjustment is
required, raising the value of the pumper's activity and dramatically
reducing overall time on the road for field personnel. "It takes
only 10-15 seconds per well to tell if everything is aligned and
working right," notes Durham.
Going forward, the ongoing widespread adoption of automated
production operations on onshore horizontal wells and the increased affordability of remote monitoring solutions will increasingly encourage the extension of automated chemical
delivery capabilities to all producing wells, according to Durham.
"As the industry has seen with other technologies over the
years, once the price points decline to a certain level, the
benefits clearly begin to outweigh cost considerations and we
will see automated chemical treatment become commonplace

Through continuous improvement, best practices and green
chemistry solutions for production and stimulation applications,
Apache Corporation and other
operators are becoming more
cost-effective and more sustainable while optimizing the performance of oil and gas assets.

44 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER
American Oil and Gas Reporter - October 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Oil and Gas Reporter - October 2017
