Production Curtailment Insights

Oil companies are sometimes required to curtail production due to a variety of reasons. The most recent example of this was the oil price crash due to spread of COVID-19. Other examples include:

• Unplanned facility outages
• Commodity price decline
• Lower demand

When faced with such scenarios, it is often uneconomic in the short-term to produce oil at maximum rates. As a result companies often curtail production rates for short periods of time until economic conditions improve. How these production cuts are managed can have long-term impacts from both the reservoir and economic perspective.

Audience

The target user base include both oil company employees faced with making curtailment decisions, and people outside of this industry who are interested to learn more about oil production curtailment. This tool can guide them through explanatory tutorials and illustrative examples that enable data-driven decision making.

An experienced user with domain knowledge can utilize the strategy tool for planning purposes. Those with less domain experience can explore the tutorial and examples provided to learn more about curtailment principles.

Data Source

The data set used in the project is a set of numerical reservoir simulation results. The data table contains reservoir time series simulation data pertaining to a single well for 10 years, estimated 10 days at a time. There are 96 scenarios exploring the impact of varying severity, duration, injectant and recovery factor on oil production curtailment. Our project is aimed to provide the glue to make these raw simulation outputs visual, interpretable, interactive, actionable, and insightful.

How to Use

This site has a variety of different sections each targeting a different user.

• Tutorials: A less experienced user can learn about the strategy tool and key concepts related to oil production curtailment.
• Examples: A user seeking more experience can work through real-world curtailment scenarios and learn how to use the strategy tool to deveop different curtailment strategies.
• Strategy Tool: An experienced user can simulate a variety of field compositions and curtailment conditions. Leveraging their expertise, they will develop an optimized action plan.