Raising the Oil & Gas Industry’s Largest Pack of WatchDogs. AFTI WatchDog is North America’s leading solution for Virtual Wellsite Monitoring

Back in 2012, Advanced Flow Technologies Inc. [AFTI] introduced WatchDog to the oil market.

At first, WatchDog’s sole capability was monitoring for production assurance. At that time, a large industry was (and still is) addressing electronic well monitoring and control. Most solutions focus on monitoring and controlling higher-flow wells with sophisticated and expensive products. These sites represent the top 20% of Canada’s wells. At that time, no one had designed a product suitable for the other 80%, the remaining 70,000 oil wells. Each one of these typically produces 10 barrels per day or less.

We were on a mission. We created a new solution for these mature, lower-producing wells. Our lofty goal was to reduce or eliminate the requirement and associated cost for field personnel to visit each and every well site daily, which was the standard operating procedure across the entire industry at that time.

Physical inspection of oil wells consumes 5-6 hours per day of a typical operator’s time. On average, operators are assigned 40-60 wells to visit every day. As you can imagine, driving to every well consumed enormous time and effort and often, only one or two wells required immediate attention.

We started to dig deeper and asked how the wells could be “visited” virtually using an electronic device, from anywhere, at any time. We introduced a manage-by-exception method with operators in the field (i.e. focusing only on problem wells). Our team knew if we could get WatchDogs in the hands of those operators willing to adopt a change in routine with a device that took a mere 20 minutes to install, they’d never look back.

In late 2012 we set out to define and then create a comprehensive WatchDog hardware unit to enable a complete “Virtual Wellsite Visit [VWV].” This would provide more information in a fraction of the time when compared to the traditional on-site visit. In these early days, the limited capabilities of WatchDog prevented us from offering a complete suite of field applications. We realized quickly that our challenges would be both technical and behavioural. We believed that this set of capabilities would make it practical for producers to switch from manual to Virtual Wellsite Visits. Our solution needed to be affordable as well as practical. We needed to do all this at a cost which made sense in a highly price-sensitive environment. Producers are reluctant to incur costs on wells that produce less, so our promised payback had to be very attractive.

Figuring out how to show if there was a leak at the well site was particularly difficult. The only truly reliable way was to add a camera to the WatchDog unit at the wellsite. After searching [unsuccessfully] for a camera certified to run in hazardous areas and able to withstand the extreme temperature fluctuations of remote operating locations, we decided to develop our camera!

By early 2015, we had dramatically improved every aspect of WatchDog’s monitoring capability:

• We advanced from monitoring a single variable (flow temperature), adding eight additional surveillance points per wellsite
• We built our operator portal, cleverly named K9
• We created our patented Flow Confidence Algorithm and analytics
• We developed our own communications platform from scratch
• We eliminated the need to connect to on-site power, simplifying installation dramatically
• We monitored the activity of the pump to know whether it was working
• We created our own proprietary camera so that our users could see if there was a leak at the wellsite.
• We monitored additional wellsite vitals like the pressures of the well’s tubing/casing
• All this data is stored in the cloud and easily accessed by operators at their fingertips
• With early installs in place, we were ready to evangelize the benefits of our new vision to the industry!

 Selling a New Operating Philosophy: The Virtual Wellsite Visit

As a result, that brought us to our behavioural challenge. This side of the equation was even more complex than our technical challenges. We want to be clear; we don’t eliminate the human; we provide quality decision data to the individual so they can make the best choice promptly.

The daily drive to the oil field was a time-honoured and comfortable method for checking on wells. The Virtual Wellsite Visit concept we were selling was regarded not only as disruptive to well surveillance but also profoundly threatening to the actual people still driving to inspect their wells. Operators believed that WatchDog would make their jobs obsolete. We believed the opposite: it would make their jobs more valuable since more time could be devoted to fixing and optimizing to deliver superior results.

For the head office, maintaining good relationships with field operations staff was/is critical; therefore, some executives were reluctant to introduce such a radically new operating philosophy. As a company, one of our core values, safety, is fundamental. We want all operators to reduce their hazardous drive to the wellsite; our team wants your team to get home safely. Every. Single. Day. Fortunately for us, a few were curious. Some even wanted to try it! From initial pilots of 5 units or so, orders slowly grew to lots of 40-50 over the ensuing years:

• 2016: We sold 400 units.
• 2017: We hit 800.
• 2018: By the end of the year, we had more than 3,000 WatchDogs deployed in remote wellsite monitoring applications. By then, producers had grown more comfortable with the Virtual Wellsite Visit concept. Field operators realized they weren’t going to be replaced by a box!
• 2019: The herd decided to move. We released our updated WatchDog 4 that year, which allowed us to reduce the price even further. This proved to be revolutionary. Our growth and customer support have been phenomenal ever since.
• 2020: 100+ producers across the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin (and increasingly in the United States) are saving significant amounts of labour cost, increasing production, reducing equipment failures, and reducing the environmental impact of wellhead leaks and emissions from the tailpipe.
• 2021: The message was out, and we initiated our adoption in the USA. Despite the challenges of COVID, we helped Operators to monitor their assets safely and independently install a few hundred WatchDogs. Like the rest of the world, we became competent at working through a screen and a video camera.
• 2022: As the world returned to normal, the energy demand resumed to something close to its historical norm. The workload on Operators to safely produce increased as the competition for resources increased, with many having to take on larger areas and more wells. With WatchDogs on over 16,000 wellsites, we added intelligence and enhanced analytics to monitor for production changes, chemical injection changes, and leak detection, proving our place as the Operator’s Best Friend in the field.

We’ve deployed a colossal dog pack, provided an efficient digital oilfield, and driven cost out of the decision, but we’re far from done. Our vision for the Virtual Wellsite Visit and WatchDog, your best friend in the field, continues to evolve based on input from and the industry we love.

For more information, contact our team at info@afti.ca.