Digital oil fields are flourishing worldwide, writes Brian Davis. The 'field of the future' is now a reality, optimising production and workflow in new fields in particular, and slowly but surely being deployed in existing fields onshore and offshore. Technology is no longer considered the main barrier to digital oil field development. Since the first smart wells began appearing in the early 1990s and the first smart fields came onstream in 2004, there have been massive leaps in terms of innovation and deployment of real-time infrastructure, real-time well monitoring, remote control and collaborative environments. As in many new technologies, the key challenge is the human factor, encouraging multi-discipline teams to collaborate closer than ever before for production and process optimisation.
展开▼
