Changqing Oilfield: Improving Quality with Intelligence and Building Intelligent Wellsites

The Longdong Plateau is known for having the thickest layer of loess in the world. It is also home to abundant underground oil and gas resources.

In 1970, over 20,000 oil workers from across the country flocked to Longdong, marking the beginning of oil reclamation in Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia. Since then, generation after generation of oil workers have toiled in the sparsely populated and harsh loess land, dedicating themselves to providing oil for China.

In recent decades, Changqing Oilfield has been at the forefront of digital and intelligent construction, serving as a pilot unit for CNPC's digital transformation and intelligent development. It aims to embrace new and evolving developments, which will enhance the working environment and methods for frontline oil workers.

Intelligent wellsites based on data

Each oilfield wellsite covers several wells, and each well is equipped with various devices like sensors, hydraulic valves, and meters, generating massive production data. Previously, most of this data relied on employees to trek through mountains and rivers and manually transcribe it.

The Changqing oil and gas area stretches for thousands of miles, with 120,000 oil and gas wells, over 2800 stations and depots, and 80,000-kilometer pipelines. The annual workload for various traditional manual inspections amounts to hundreds of thousands of inspections, with dedicated inspectors accounting for about two-thirds of the total workforce. Therefore, managing oil wells is incredibly challenging, and frontline employees face intense labor demands.

Take the No. 11 Oil Production Plant of Changqing Oilfield as an example. In the past, the production data of oil wells, video, and wellhead automation equipment was not connected. Frontline employees needed to switch between multiple systems to view the data. Furthermore, ZigBee polling was primarily utilized for communication at wellsites. However, it had a low transmission rate, significant data loss, and inadequate anti-interference, and would even lose important information like dynamometer cards.

To address these challenges, the No. 11 Oil Production Plant has partnered with Huawei to explore intelligent wellsites that do not require staffed inspection. This collaboration focuses on five key areas: data collection, high-speed transmission, intelligent analysis, automatic control, and device management.

• Data collection infrastructure upgrade ensures data collection and high-speed transmission.

Unstaffed inspection at intelligent wellsites uses Huawei's intelligent converged terminals to integrate devices such as the main RTU, optical fiber transceiver, and gateway. This enables unified IoT access of digital devices at the wellsites. The wireless backhaul mode of wellhead data is upgraded from ZigBee to Wi-Fi 6, and single-well polling is upgraded to multi-well concurrency. The data collection bandwidth is improved by an order of magnitude, ensuring real-time and comprehensive sensing of wellsite production data.

After the upgrade, the pilot wellsite now collects 288 dynamometer cards per day, doubling the previous count of 144. The collection period is also reduced by half. Additionally, the network bandwidth has significantly improved, increasing from 250 Kbit/s to 575 Mbit/s, showing exponential growth.

• Intelligent oilfield production reduces energy consumption and costs without compromising production efficiency.

The synergy between edge computing and cloud computing allows for the real-time analysis of wellsite data. This enables autonomous decision-making for functions like condition diagnosis, diagram yield calculation, and intelligent intermittent production, which enhances wellsite autonomy.

By incorporating AI, video sensing is integrated with the production environment. This allows for intelligent identification and analysis of exceptions, such as well leakage and trespassing. Actions like alarm reporting and well stopping can then be automatically executed, reducing the need for manual intervention and enhancing operational safety.

By implementing intelligent group control and coordination, as well as single-well intelligent control, we can achieve intelligent intermittent production while maintaining stable production. This approach maximizes the production efficiency of individual wells, allowing high production wells to pump more and low production wells to pump less. As a result, overall energy consumption is reduced by 50%.

• Full-lifecycle device management improves management efficiency.

Huawei's intelligent wellsite solution considers the management and maintenance of various digital devices at wellsites. This solution significantly enhances the efficiency of oilfield device management. The time required for device fault detection is reduced from 1 day to just 10 minutes. As a result, the onsite maintenance workload is reduced by 50%.

Oilfields are experiencing a wave of intelligent transformation

The traditional petroleum industry, especially upstream oil exploration and production, has been lagging behind in terms of digitalization. But Rome was not built in a day.

With the full integration of digital technologies like 5G, cloud computing, AI, and big data into the oil and gas industry, we can confidently say that a highly intelligent oil and gas industry is becoming a reality.