The dramatic increase we see in SiteView software implementations reflects a critical business need for producers: accurately reporting on costs, emissions, and physical assets for surface operations. While many companies have a tried-and-true method of capturing downhole data/costs and reporting them in an efficient manner, the same cannot be said for surface operations, which has long played a distant second in analysis for dollars spent, activity recorded and accurate inventories.
The importance of surface data management has a new urgency. New requirements for emissions reporting, combined with the increased complexity of surface operations, have forced companies to look carefully at how they pull surface data together. They see a need to start tracking individual attributes for equipment, large and small, for emissions reporting and inventory keeping.
Furthermore, today’s super batteries and large-scale production facilities come with significant price tags. Allocating those costs back to projects using the old spreadsheet method is cumbersome and inefficient. A better solution is needed.
SiteView fills this need for many companies today, especially those with WellView in place. We see this trend continuing. Three projects we’ve completed illustrate how companies have a new focus on optimizing surface operations.
SiteView for Emissions Reporting
One of our clients – call them Company A – operates in Colorado, where the state and county agencies have stepped up requirements for emissions reporting. With more stringent and detailed reporting needs, the company’s environmental team needed a better place to record the attributes to comply with this requirement. They engaged Stonebridge to configure SiteView for EHS – which was unique because SiteView implementations typically start with operations and construction activity.
However, the EHS need was deemed urgent due to the higher profile reporting. While the environmental team had a current spreadsheet containing compressors and engines, they wanted to maintain the inspections and set dates in a database, knowing operations would be catching up to them. We expedited the EHS rollout using our SiteReady Environmental profile, prebuilt reports and QRCs for SiteView users.
SiteView for Inventory Reporting
As the EHS implementation project was winding down, Company A hired a new field operations manager with SiteView experience, who wanted to incorporate SiteView into his team’s daily routine as soon as possible. They needed to track all large equipment items on location and high-pressure valves in Boulder County, a very high-profile area. An existing pipeline was also in scope, along with a testing tracking schedule for all equipment.
In this second SiteView implementation phase at the company, we incorporated attributes related to the construction of large production facilities, setting up proper jobs to capture activity and costs, recording all location-specific equipment when it was set using the Material Transfer wizard. We defined the site hierarchy based on EHS, production and operations reporting needs to determine what a site should be.
The lease operators provided a complete equipment inventory with key identifiers to load into SiteView. We created a new Pipeline profile to accommodate the new requirements for this department, along with reports, SOPs and QRCs to assist in data governance and data entry. Lastly, we developed a maintenance testing process and related reports to keep everyone informed of all testing completed, scheduled, and past due.
SiteView for Equipment Location Tracking
Another of our clients – Company B – was a heavy WellView user and had used SiteView for a few years in a limited fashion, for recording costs for capital and LOE projects. Last year they began constructing super batteries and had experienced issues with reallocating the costs accurately. Originally the sites had been set up as capital sites and LOE sites to match the accounting structure.
They now wanted to redefine their sites, including how they captured costs, and to start recording equipment inventories on producing locations and yards so they would have a quick and accurate way to pull up equipment lists.
The first thing we did as their SiteView consultant was define what a site should be. Instead of tracking locations based on their accounting setup, we defined a site as a physical location. The super structure thereby became the site, composed of individual tank batteries and wells feeding into the structure.
Surface locations were set up for each element (e.g., individual tank batteries and the central battery), and wells were linked to the site itself from WellView. This allowed the designation of what element had a piece of equipment set on it (e.g., separators set on tank batteries, flares set on the central battery, etc.). Then jobs could be set up using the Linked Components table to further define work activities associated with each specific element or well.
With this process in place, Company B can easily determine how many dollars were spent on each site, along with a breakdown of capital or LOE costs and individual element costs.
To accelerate the project benefits and reduce project costs, we incorporated our proprietary SiteReady Production Facility user profiles and reports to capture the equipment set on location. The Material Transfer wizard is used to track movement of equipment as well to maintain an accurate inventory of equipment on location and in the yard.
Conclusion. The trend in surface operations optimization using SiteView reflects the knowledge that, regardless of oil prices, companies are determined to account for every dollar spent. Moreover, federal, state and county agencies are ramping up their reporting requirements to appease the growing desire for a cleaner, safer environment.
Given this context, more and more companies are concluding they need to have a better way to track this surface information in a lean work environment. SiteView offers a powerful solution for surface data management and reporting.
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