Fiber optic sensing has traditionally been a challenging sector to enter. High entry costs have meant that building an in-house fiber optic sensing service offering is difficult for all but the biggest O&G service providers.
However, fiber optic sensing is a compelling and complementary value proposition for any O&G service provider, particularly those specializing in interventions. Fiber optic sensing shows operators what is happening in the subsurface 24/7, helping them pinpoint well integrity and production issues quickly and safely. LYTT’s real-time analytics solution enables intervention and wireline companies of any size to benefit from fiber optic sensing as a value-add to their existing service portfolio/offerings.
To extend the benefits of fiber optic sensing further, LYTT is actively recruiting partners in the intervention sector. By adding LYTT’s end-to-end monitoring and analytics solution to your intervention offering, we can help you deliver increased field-wide optimization, enhanced hydrocarbon recovery, improved wellwork efficiency and restored production to your existing customers.
Below are three key ways LYTT can benefit intervention and wireline companies and transform their operating model using fiber optic sensing, combined with real-time analytics.
1. Accessing the fiber market
Not all wireline and intervention businesses use fiber as a data source. As the applications for fiber optic sensing grow, it increasingly comes into competition with other data logging services. The digital transformation of the intervention sector provides a new opportunity to enhance existing offerings with fiber optic services.
The old fiber optic model tied high-end processing to proprietary hardware, with little opportunity for intervention companies to develop compatible systems of their own that can work seamlessly with such unique data streams. Partnering with an advanced real-time analytics service provider like LYTT, which can work with the full spectrum of sensor hardware on the market, allows intervention businesses the flexibility to more effectively deploy their own intervention assets informed by fiber optic insights; such as identifying the exact location of water or sand ingress and quantifying its impacts on production, or differentiating between leak and flow events to inform remedial strategies.
Combining real-time data analytics with existing hardware in this way enables smarter, faster operational decision-making, without the need for large investments in new hardware or technology.
2. Scaling intervention offerings
Some service offerings work well when dealing with a limited number of projects at a time. However, a major bottleneck to scaling these existing fiber optic services is the analytics resource itself. Building a real-time analytics and monitoring offering from scratch is unrealistic for most businesses and detracts from their core competencies.
Compounding this problem, to effectively service regional portfolios using traditional fiber optics analytics methods, intervention companies would need to build a highly skilled analysis team to process the volume of data rapidly enough to provide value to the end customer. This solution simply isn’t scalable as operational volumes increase.
By partnering with LYTT, intervention businesses benefit from a ready-built, cloud-based data analytics platform that transforms terabytes of sensor data into actionable insights that can be accessed anywhere with an internet connection within seconds. By automating data processing and removing the “people” component within the process, intervention specialists are empowered to keep their teams streamlined and focus on addressing asset issues aligned with their core competencies.
3. Improving operational efficiency
At the time of writing, the oil price is above $120. Asset operators are focused on extracting as much oil as possible during this period to maximize revenue. As a result, production optimization companies’ services are in high demand. However, conventional logging methodologies tend to limit these businesses to servicing one or two wells per day.
Additionally, it can often take multiple interventions to troubleshoot issues like unwanted water production – with three rounds of interventions costing upwards of $500,000, exclusive of revenue lost to asset downtime. By adding fiber optic, real-time analytics capabilities to their service offering, intervention companies can reduce operational risk and deliver significant savings for their customers, pinpointing issues with a single intervention, minimizing unnecessary production deferral.
Ultimately, faster insights mean more capacity to address additional issues with a customer’s assets, meaning that intervention businesses can deliver added value to their customers within the same timeframe.
Summary
Partnering with LYTT allows intervention and wireline providers to digitally enhance their existing offering, improving wellwork efficiency and restoring production for their clients. LYTT’s real-time analytics and visualization platform has already generated hundreds of millions of dollars in value to customers globally. There are many exciting companies in the intervention space that are ready to take a step into fiber, or to streamline their existing fiber offering. If that describes your company, reach out to me at [email protected] to learn more about what LYTT can do for you.