J Roger Hite, Business Fundamentals Group, David Shaw, Knowledge Reservoir, and John Warren, Halliburton.

SPE Paper 102497 was prepared for presentation at the 2006 SPE Annual Technology Conference and Exhibition in San Antonio, Texas, 24-27 September, 2006.

Abstract
Water Management is an important and often neglected aspect of well management and production optimization. It can often cost substantial amounts of investment dollars, but is often poorly designed, implemented and managed. A key issue is that the industry is poorly informed about standards, available technologies, best practices and options. To address this issue, Halliburton has been directing a multi-year, cross-industry initiative to develop a web-based Information Resource for Water Management Technology. This public portal is intended for the working engineer, working throughout the petroleum industry, to understand current and up-to-date Water Management principles, technologies, best practices and lessons learned.

Key to the success of the Information Resource has been a careful mission and design study, executed in collaboration with industry experts taken from a variety of operating oil companies. These experts formed an advisory board that both provided the initial direction and design concept, as well as validated the implementation and rollout. The Information Resource has been rolled out as a public portal open to any engineer who registers, and currently contains field experience and technical data for the majority of the available significant treatments.

The Information Resource has been modeled on standard portal concepts, and consists of main sections that include: Information; Lifecycle Issues; A Performance Database containing key performance indicators; Community of Experts links; and on-line Economic Evaluation and Treatment Design tools. Going forward, the portal provides a platform for providing future e-Learning, collaboration and document sharing tools. The key conclusions learned from this development project were the importance of: (a) involving key cross-industry experts and potential users in an efficiently-managed advisory board; (b) an accurate and well-defined mission statement; (c) a flexible and expandable software and IT platform for deployment; and (d) constant attention to the end-user and goals during technical development.

Cross-industry technology initiatives are very rare in the petroleum industry, and there are certainly none in the discipline of Water Management. At the same time, there are huge inefficiencies due to poorly designed, implemented and managed projects. The development of this Information Resource is not only important to Production Optimization engineers, but also to all those involved in the development of similar technology portals – whether in-house or public – across the industry.

For a complete copy of the paper please visit the SPE library at www.onepetro.org.