Driving Operational Improvements in Oil and Gas Production

Emerson's Jose Jimenez at OTC 2018Emerson’s Jose Jimenez presented at the 2018 Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) about how leverage field intelligence to advance an Operational Certainty strategy. He explored the role of automated procedures in improving operational performance.

Jose opened sharing a statistic that global oil & gas producers lost over $300B in profitability from operational problems—safety, reliability and efficiency. Top quartile performers have 8% higher cumulative production, 40% lease operating expenses and half the safety recordable incidents.

Top quartile performers find ways to automate manual processes that expose their personnel to risk. This includes task performed in hazardous locations such as manual tank gauging on the top of lease storage tanks in onshore well pads.

What are the capabilities that oil & gas producers need to have? Some of these capabilities include reducing deferred production and improve allocation measurement, automate & optimize artificial lift operations and reduce lost and unaccounted-for production.

From a cost management perspective, there is an opportunity to leverage analytics and automation diagnostics to improve reliability. Secondly instead of manual operator rounds, more measurements can enable exception-based operator round. Finally, by close measuring chemical injection enables the opportunity to save 180K gals/year for a typical well pad.

From an HSSE perspective, tank levels can be automatically gauged, equivalent CO2 emissions can be reduced via electric instead of gas-actuated valves, and remote condition monitoring can reduce time spent in hazardous locations.

By starting with people and processes and adding technologies where it makes sense, oil & gas producers can improve their quartile performance relative to their peers in safety, reliability, production levels and efficiency.

Visit the Oil & Gas area of Emerson.com for more on some of the ways to make these improvements and visit the Emerson oil & gas industry team in the OTC exhibit area in the Emerson booth #2261.

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