The research team of Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of sciences (CASIA) has developed a new device to acquire downhole pressure in real time, and a wellhead monitoring system for oil and gas well.

Oil and gas are of vital significance to the sustainable and stable development of China’s national economy and security. However, because of the comparatively low oil and gas reserves in China, the production capacity of many oil and gas wells has gradually reduced, leading to the dependence on large imports. Therefore, it is an urgent and important problem to enhance the measurement technique of oil and gas well production, and to extend both the production life and the extraction rate in the long-term national energy strategy.

The downhole pressure of oil and gas well is one of the most essential parameters in the exploration procedure, which helps the experts analyze the oil and gas reserves and make the overall plan. Furthermore, only with the real-time dynamic changes of downhole pressure can the engineers modify the production plan, optimize the production capacity, and ensure the production security.

Scientists of CASIA have proposed the key technologies including the downhole pressure acquisition and processing in real time, the remote monitoring of production procedure, as well as the solution to system integration. Through years of efforts, they have implemented the device and system with independent intellectual property rights, achieving the breakthrough of traditional approaches.

The new downhole pressure acquisition system with capillary tube has been utilized an indirect real-time computing method, solving the difficulty of inferring the downhole pressure data from the wellhead monitoring data, and satisfying the requirements of real time and accuracy in practical production. The real-time data acquisition system of downhole pressure has been designed for operation in the harsh environments. Even when suffering a large temperature difference, high humidity and salt fog, the system can continue acquiring the downhole pressure reliably.

Moreover, the scientists have developed the network distributed monitoring system for managing monitoring data, and have proposed the remote control methods for monitoring device, as well as the communication protocol to secure data transmission. All of these are designed for early warning and processing the emergency situations in oil and gas well.

By breaking through a serious of key technologies and conquering the difficulties of practical applications, this new technique has become popular and worked steadily for long periods of time among 219 oil and gas wells, such as Shengli Oilfield, Tianjin Branch of CNOOC Oilfield, Tarim Oilfield, Japan-Vietnam Petroleum Company, Hoan Vu Joint Operating Company, Indonesia Mobil Cepu Ltd., etc. Since October of 2005 till now, a direct economic benefit of 229,750,000 RMB and 4,830,000 USD has been earned. Four invention patents, five utility model patents, and two software copies have been authorized for this project. In 2010, this achievement won the second prize of Beijing Science and Technology Awards.