Virtual flow metering of production flow rates of individual wells in oil and gas platforms through data reconciliation

In the present work, virtual flow metering (VFM) tools are developed to provide estimates for the individual flow rate measurements of the wells operated simultaneously in typical oil and gas platforms. Data reconciliation (DR) procedures are used to calibrate phenomenological models using available measured profiles of well pressure and temperature, and overall flow rates of gas, oil and water. In order to evaluate the relative importance of key hypotheses, three different phenomenological models were used to describe the platform operation: (i) a simple single phase fluid flow model, to evaluate whether the DR task can be successfully accomplished with the available data; (ii) a simple multiphase fluid flow model, in order to evaluate whether the explicit consideration of the multiphase nature of the problem can affect the obtained DR results; and (iii) a detailed phenomenological multiphase flow model, to represent accurately the behavior of an oil and gas production platform. Obtained results show that the proposed DR scheme can be indeed implemented successfully in the form of a VFM sensor to assign online and in real time the individual production of wells operated simultaneously in typical oil and gas platforms. The DR-based VFM was able to reconcile total oil and total water flow rates with average relative deviations of 0.87% and 17% respectively and maximum deviation of 2.3% for oil flow rates. Besides, the DR-based VFM tool provided insights about the system behavior and sensoring management, being able to indicate the oil lines and sensors that were subject to the highest variability.