Power and monitoring for remote artificial lifts

A National Oil Company (NOC) and International Oil Company (IOC) Joint Venture have around 38 production wells operating in a remote oil field in the Western Desert area of Egypt. With no grid connection available, they rely on their own power generation at site.

Their incumbent power provider was suffering repeated power trips and failures increasing the Operator’s non-productive time (NPT) and ultimately causing oil deferment. In 2019, keen to resolve this, the JV decided to re-tender the project. Uptime and performance metrics were a key factor in who the JV would reward the new contract to.

Having a strong reputation in country after successfully delivering a large project in the West Nile Delta for another IOC, Aggreko was invited to tender.

On reviewing the tender and scope of work, Aggreko proposed a total of 45 high quality reliable gensets ranging from 60kVA to 1500 kVA to cover the 38 production wells. We are supplying standalone sets to low production wells where singular generators are powering the customer’s Variable Speed Drive (VSD) ESP, and dual generators that will work on an operation/standby mode for their higher production wells.

To ensure we limit trips and NPT we are applying our Best Operation Practice (BOP) and performing daily checks on the sets to ensure they are maintained and service on time.

Aggreko Remote Monitoring (ARM) is fitted on all the generators we provided and where network connectivity allows, we are closely monitoring those assets to ensure uptime and predict trips before they happen. Where ARM isn’t available, we are connected to the customers SCADA system to monitor the performance.

From contract signing to commissioning, we were able to mitigate their shutdown period delivering 15 of the generators in just 10 days, with the remaining generators arriving 8 weeks later.

The project has a team of five dedicated Aggreko expert technicians who carried out the installation and commissioning and are subsequently now supporting the project operations 24/7.

We have been working on this project since 2019 without any health and safety issues and have reduced the overall trips through our close monitoring, predicting of issues and servicing schedules which has reduced the operators NPT by around 60%, maximised their uptime and secured oil production.