American Oil and Gas Reporter - January 2016 - 91

Production Technology
Denbury's tertiary recovery strategy has
enabled it to produce, on average, an additional 17 percent of original oil in place
from the mature oil fields it has acquired.
To date, the company has produced more
than 70 million barrels of oil (net) with
CO2 tertiary recovery, and it holds an estimated 331 million barrels of CO2 EOR
barrels in its Rocky Mountain assets, and
another 587 million barrels in its Gulf
Coast properties.
In both regions, Denbury's strategy includes purchasing mature fields, securing
CO2 sources, and building pipeline and
processing infrastructure. The CO2 EOR
process begins with producing carbon
dioxide from natural reserves such as the
Jackson Dome Field in Mississippi. The
CO2 is processed to remove water and other contaminants, compressed into liquid
form, and then shipped through Denbury's pipeline network to mature oil
fields, where it is injected into the reservoir in a supercritical state.
Enterprisewide SCADA Strategy
The assets acquired by Denbury have
contained different types of SCADA systems encompassing various measurement
metrics and data management philosophies.
With each asset acquisition, Denbury has
faced data management challenges. The
previous owner of an asset may have installed SCADA systems to monitor and
control the various processes taking place
in a field, pipeline or processing facility, but
there may not have been a fieldwide SCADA strategy in place.
In fact, a single asset can have different SCADA systems from different vendors for different processes. These systems
often cannot communicate efficiently,
making data transfer between systems and
the ability to manage fieldwide data
streams challenging, if not impossible.
Without a proper enterprise strategy, an operator can find himself with fragmented
data and applications across the enterprise,
and possessing unusable or unmanageable
information technology systems. These
fragmented solutions may become a liability when trying to manage an asset's
technology, equipment and people.
In the early days of its CO2 EOR
strategy, Denbury did not have a companywide SCADA enterprise system. Instead, it performed SCADA installations
and upgrades to acquired assets on an asneeded basis, and used multiple service

providers and solution integrators. As its
number of assets and geographic span
grew, management saw a need for a standardized, enterprisewide SCADA management strategy that would provide a robust
network infrastructure, secure data storage,
efficient historical data warehousing, and
efficient data cataloging and access to
make faster and more informed operations
and business decisions.
The company formed a task force to investigate the SCADA systems in place for
Denbury's three major asset categories:
producing fields, pipelines, and processing plants. Based on the needs of these assets, the objective was to narrow SCADA
management to one piece of software for
the entire company that would provide:
* Efficient data management to support tertiary and nontertiary production,
CO2 supply, and pipeline SCADA;
* Standardization to allow for smooth
transition of operations staff between
fields;
* Data warehousing infrastructure to
provide accurate trending and reporting;
* A method to ensure that IT best
practices could be followed for all supporting SCADA infrastructure;
* Development and implementation
consistency across the entire organization;
* Capabilities to manage hardware
and software life cycle maintenance; and
* A secure redundant network for

SCADA installations on future assets.
The task force began by examining the
SCADA systems being used in the company's pipeline assets, focusing on finding
a single software solution that could provide all the specified benefits and have the
scalability to manage datasets from Denbury's well sites and CO2 processing
plants. Ultimately, Denbury selected an enterprise operations platform (EOP) designed to give companies the ability to
manage, archive and use field data to improve operational efficiency and market responsiveness, while also complying with
increasing regulatory and safety initiatives.
Denbury has installed more than 20 systems to date. With each installation, the
SCADA strategy has become increasingly repeatable, reliable and sustainable, and the operator is achieving greater
efficiency gains. From placing the order
to activating the system on an asset, the average setup time for acquisitions of enterprise SCADA systems is 90 and 120
days. The installations are creating future
savings through ease of operations, reduced downtime and improved efficiency.
Standardized operating procedures also
have been established for additional efficiency, consistency and safety gains.
Robust Data Platform
The EOP allows for the efficient and robust management of data from each asset,

FIGURE 1
Major Benefits Provided by Enterprise Operations Platform

JANUARY 2016 91
American Oil and Gas Reporter - January 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Oil and Gas Reporter - January 2016
