Enabling Industry 4.0

Data-driven Virtual Flow Meter

Mathematical model that uses process conditions to estimate flow rates instead of using a physical meter
Advanced Analytics
Oil & Gas
With more wells to manage by production engineers and limited access to real-time critical data, maintaining production optimization continues to be a major challenge in oil and gas companies
Aspiration
Being able to measure and optimize flow without physical flow meter that will reduce cost of installation and allow production engineers to monitor flow on hundreds of wells, remotely and effectively.
Approach
Virtual Flow Meter is the cheapest solution for estimating the oil and gas production rate, if compared to a physical flow meter. It mainly uses the already available data such as pressure and temperature of bottomhole and wellhead choke to estimate the oil/gas flow rates. This method focuses on finding relationships between the system’s input and output data using minimum understanding of the working physical properties. It makes no assumption on the governing system, and removes any numerical challenges when no closed-form solution is available. Since data is the main source of truth for this approach, data validation process is needed to avoid biases due to incorrect or poor data quality.
Outcome
  • No installation required of an additional hardware, hence a reduction in capital and operational costs
  • No production loss if compared to manual well testing, and physical flow meter approach
  • Lower complexity if compared to first-principles VFM that requires good understanding of mechanic, fluid modeling and optimization.
Next Use Case
Heat Rate Optimization
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