Situation:

A large energy provider on the East cost of Australia built and commissioned a wide fleet of major gas facilities to dehydrate and compress wet coal seam gas (CSG) received from an extensive network gathering hundreds of wells. Periodically, it was necessary to complete a complex campaign of preventative maintenance (PM) tasks on these gas facilities to meet safety standards. Some PM tasks dictated that the facility must be blown down and totally free of pressurised gas. The CSG wells would forward flow to these facilities utilising both reservoir pressure and downhole water pumps. These pumps experienced the highest levels of reliability when they were left in a steady state operation. The cost to repair just a single CSG downhole pump could be in excess of $150k. So what to do when a major facility shutdown event forces the need for hundreds of wells to be taken offline? Is a multi-million dollar financial impact deemed acceptable as a justifiable cost of operation expense or is it avoidable?

Task:

As an employee, I was responsible for an enterprise level well curtailment plan that sought to redirect gas flows to neighbouring online facilities or alternatively to safely take offline wells that presented the lowest levels of financial risk exposure. Additionally, the plan needed to safely restore gas flows to full pre-shutdown production rates.