Harnessing Data Science for Produced Water Estimation: Unleashing the Power of Data-Driven Techniques

In the oil and gas industry, monitoring the percentage of water content in produced hydrocarbons is crucial to ensure optimal production quality control and prevent equipment damage. The accurate estimation of the water cut, representing the proportion of water produced relative to the total fluid volume extracted from oil and gas wells, is crucial for effective reservoir management and production optimization. It allows the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) to come up with an optimized production strategy to minimize water production while maximizing oil recovery. Management of water has a direct impact on the economic factor of oil field operations. Unwarranted water production can raise the lifting cost and efforts to manage, process, and dispose of the produced water. Having a system to monitor the water cut with an accurate estimation helps optimize the cost, utilizes the resources effectively, allows planning and design of facility ahead of time to provide sufficient capacity and efficient processes and equipment, helps KOC to comply with the environmental regulations on disposing of the produced water, and enable informed decision making for reservoir management and development. The water cut from production tests such as Portable Gas Oil Ratio (PGOR) is considered the most accurate. It is acquired approximately 3-4 times a year for each producing well and therefore cannot provide continuous water cut monitoring. Downhole sensor data including pressure discharge provide real-time data on reservoir dynamics and fluid behavior within the well. By strategically deploying, an array of these sensors along the wellbore, valuable insights into liquid composition can be obtained, offering the potential for accurate water cut estimation.