A Case Study in Process Efficiency and Data Management
Petrobras is one of the world’s largest publicly traded oil companies, with total global daily production of 2.3 million barrels of oil equivalent a day. Petrobras America (PAI), headquartered in Houston, Texas, has a portfolio of exploration prospects in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Problem
Petrobras America planned to go-live with their first operated property, and needed a platform to monitor and manage their production on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Like most companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico, PAI shares their production revenue with multiple partners, often with a different level of financial interest for each “completion” of a drilled well. With oil and gas production potentially in the millions of dollars per day, PAI needed a way to ensure that the production being allocated to them was accurate.
The Solution
Entrance partnered with Creel and Associates, a leading production accounting firm, to create a Production Operations Database (POD) to track gross and net production volumes in the Gulf of Mexico. POD understands the geographical, pipeline, and legal reporting hierarchies in the Gulf and can report on production data at any level desired. All calculations are performed per completion regardless of where each component of the calculation comes from (e.g. marketed interest is determined at the lease level). For raw production data, POD can accept the field allocation performed by PAI or their partners or perform a
pro-rata allocation based on well-test results.
Centralized data storage
POD has the ability to track theoretical production, reported OGOR production, and sales volumes for every property that PAI has an interest in (operated or not). POD can produce a variety of reports in Excel format, aggregating data at the Area, Block, Lease, Well, or Completion level. POD can also export directly to third-party tools or expose calculated and raw data via ODBC.
Reporting hierarchy
POD calculates all gross and net volumes at the well completion level, and allows users to run reports at any level in the reporting hierarchy (A/B/L/W/C, Platform, Reservoir, etc).
Auditing
A key requirement during development of POD was that PAI be able to audit the results of field allocations over which PAI has no control. After consultation with Creel and Associates, Entrance developed a variance report that compares field allocation results to well test volumes (adjusting for downtime, etc). This report can be used to identify when the volume of production allocated to PAI rises or falls relative to the expected production. Based on this information, PAI can decide whether to perform a formal audit or request that additional well tests be performed to validate the allocation results.