Presentation: Tullow Oil: Use of the PI System for a Deepwater Oil & Gas Field

Tullow's Jubilee Field is located in offshore West Africa in the Gulf of Guinea at a water depth of 1250m. The high cost of field maintenance and inaccessible deepwater environment mean that data acquisition and analyses are key to proactive field management without reactive intervention in the wells. To ensure maximum data utilization in the wells, subsea and topsides network, Tullow developed, the Technology Assisted Production System (TAPS), a production data management and analyses system with the PI System as a central component.

In TAPs, the PI System feeds high frequency raw data from the field to various other application modules to perform production functions, such as integrated asset modelling, hydrocarbon accounting and allocation, deferment management and analyses, production optimization and production reporting. 'Processed' data from these application modules is then fed back into the PI System for visualization and trending.

TAPS provides a platform to automate routine and repetitive engineering tasks, so there is more quality engineering time for actual analyses and for integration between the various functions and disciplines. The system has paid rich dividends to resolve critical issues, including severe and unprecedented productivity impairment in the wells and hydrate blockage in one of the risers. Tullow is now developing another deepwater field in the same region, known as TEN, and TAPS will be deployed there to utilize the PI System and its visualization suite for asset performance and integrity management.