Real-time corrosion and scale risk identification
Up-to-the-minute information means no more waiting months for usable data from traditional manual monitoring.
Automated generation of actionable insights
Automated advisory system identifies at-risk wells and generates insights to optimize chemical injection.
Autonomous chemical injection
Chemical pump rates are adjusted in real time in response to automated insights to ensure effective chemical injection and treatment.
Production systems are dynamic by nature, with constantly varying conditions. Chemical injection systems must be continually adjusted to reflect these changes to ensure continuous protection of critical assets and optimize opex spend. DELFI Production Chemicals provides innovative solutions to the common flow assurance and asset integrity challenges of corrosion and scale that enable the chemical injection to adjust harmoniously with changes in the production system.
By leveraging digital capabilities, what were previously manual chemical treatment processes requiring frequent field visits are transformed into autonomous chemical injection systems. The existing equipment is connected for real-time data acquisition to inform inline use of physics-based models such as a virtual flowmeter, edge analytics, and cloud computing. From this contextual basis, DELFI Production Chemicals autonomously generates actionable insights and adjusts chemical injection to continuously optimize chemical injection and extend both uptime and the life of production equipment. The number of field visits is significantly reduced, along with their carbon emissions.
The challenge: Corrosion and scale are two of the most common challenges facing producers today, with inhibitors accounting for more than 50% of the USD 8 billion global production chemical spend. The problem in managing corrosion and scale through chemical injection does not lie in inhibitor formulation—these are proved to be highly effective in protecting production systems. The weak link in chemical treatment programs is the manual nature traditionally employed to monitor risks and chemical performance, which introduces delays in taking preventive action and undermines alignment of the chemical treatment with the ever-changing well conditions.
The solution: DELFI Production Chemicals significantly reduces the time from insight to action by acquiring and processing data in real time to provide continuous optimization recommendations and autonomous action.
The challenge: Ineffectively managed corrosion and scale risk can lead to wells failing prematurely. This causes producers to incur increased workover costs and experience decreased production revenue. For example, an onshore producer had a conventional manual corrosion and scale chemical treatment program but was running up more than USD 8 million in annual workover costs and more than USD 5 million in annual production losses. These costs were largely due to the suboptimal frequency inherent in manually performing corrosion and scale risk monitoring methods.
The solution: DELFI Production Chemicals leverages edge intelligence via Agora edge AI and IoT solutions and executes physics-based models using real-time data to continuously monitor changes in well conditions and their impact on corrosion and scale risk for ultimately mitigating the occurrence of well failures.
The challenge: Wells are not static systems, yet manually managed chemical treatments can remain unchanged for weeks until new data is made available. This lack of treatment alignment results in chronic overtreatment and undertreatment, neither of which mitigates corrosion and scale risk effectively, which can lead to production shutdowns and increased costs.
The solution: DELFI Production Chemicals enables real-time optimization, including autonomous control of the chemical injection pumps. The result is chemical injection that is continuously on target, eliminating over- and undertreatment and their deleterious effects on production.
Ineffective production chemical treatment is the root cause of more than 20% of ESP failures, resulting in lost production and rising workover costs.
Over- and undertreatment issues primarily stem from the inability of traditional manual monitoring of changes in well conditions to provide data at sufficient frequency for continuously optimizing chemical treatments. Critical data such as production rates, injection rates, and scale and corrosion risk in turn trigger manual interventions, which are difficult to perform at optimal frequency.
By digitalizing monitoring, analysis, prediction, and treatment as a continuous closed loop process, DELFI Production Chemicals makes critical data such as production rates and system risks available as often as every minute, depending on the operator’s data frequency. Furthermore, DELFI Production Chemicals is an open system applicable regardless of the chemical or ESP provider. Operators’ organizations are provided with cloud-based access to real-time data updates as frequently as 1,440 times per day. Autonomous surveillance and injection rate optimization mean that ESPs are protected against corrosion- and scale-induced failures, which enables increased uptime and ultimately production revenue.
