Harnessing Cloud Technology for Well Performance in the Oil and Gas Sector

When oil producers invest in innovative technologies, they can increase production, reduce operational expenditure, gain better performance, and create an environmental difference. 

Krzysztof Palka, CEO of Akinê Inc., has developed a cloud platform, Akinê Live, that increases well productivity through proactive identification of underperforming wells.

Krzysztof sat down with Rachel Gregory, Digital Host at The Global Energy Show, to discuss how the cloud-based platform is helping oil producers advance with digital transformation. Not only does their cloud platform assist producers and track metrics, but it is also projected to reduce over 26,000 tons of C02 annually.

Global Energy Show Series - Harnessing Cloud Technology for the Oil and Gas Sector

How Akinê Inc Leverages Cloud Computing to Increase Well Productivity

Rachel: How does Akinê Inc. technology help oil producers increase the productivity of their wells? 

Krzysztof: Our cloud platform, Akinê Live, provides the most accurate and cost-effective way to identify and measure changes in daily well production, fluid level, and artificial lift performance in real-time.

Our advanced machine learning analytics helps production engineers and field staff understand what happened, why it happened, and most importantly, what is needed to make improvements. Together with our IOT controllers, our cloud platform operates wells at the most optimum point while ensuring protection of sensitive data.

How Companies Can Benefit from Akinê’s Advanced Cloud Infrastructure

Rachel: Akinê Inc won the Digital Innovator Global Energy Show award in 2020 for Akinê Inc. cloud platform technology. Can you tell us more about this technology and the benefits of implementing it?

Krzysztof: Our cloud technology is extremely user-friendly, powerful, transparent, and focuses on accurate, real-time, actionable information. Our analytics are based on a very advanced proprietary identification of downhole friction acting along with the road streak.

This dramatically improves the accuracy of calculating downhole pump behaviour and real-time pump performance. Our integrated machine learning provides the most advanced downfall analytics available today for every road pumping well.

How Akinê Inc Found a Gap in the Oil and Gas Industry

Rachel: So what sparked the idea for a technology that would help increase well productivity by identifying underperforming wells?

Krzysztof: I have been involved in optimizing conventional and shared oil wells for over 20 years. I had an opportunity to see the challenge of optimizing well productivity from both sides: the technology supply chains and the oil producers. It took a lot of modelling and field testing to see that the moonshot idea to identify downhole friction and improve downhole calculation would work. 

Our team found a new, ingenious way to identify the magnitude and location of downhill friction that could not be properly calculated using well deviation. 

How Companies Can Reach Business Goals With the Oil and Gas Industry

Rachel: How does Akinê Inc technology help achieve environmental goals within the oil and gas industry?

Krzysztof: Well consumption is one of the top three largest operating cost components for conventional and tight oil wells. The largest component of upstream emissions is associated with energy generation to run oil extraction. 

By reducing the energy intensity of oil production, we decrease the operating cost and emission intensity of our operation. It is a win-win situation for everyone when profitability and environmental performance increase simultaneously. 

For wells equipped with our IOT solution, energy intensity associated with production and workovers is substantially decreased by 30 to 50%, translating into a similar reduction in GHG emissions. By 2024, we anticipate having over a thousand wells on our service. Our technology will result in an emission reduction of over 26,000 tons of CO2 equivalent annually. 

The Future of Akinê Inc

Rachel: What is the future for Akinê Inc?

Krzysztof: We are very excited about our future as a leading technology provider for the digital oil field. Supported by CRIO Alberta Innovates, we are well into the second phase of our four-phase five-year plan to develop a fully autonomous artificial intelligence-supported well automation optimization solution. 

We are incorporating machine learning analytics into our platform to identify undesirable well behaviour automatically. We are also working on enhancing our platform to provide actionable information to control well operation with additional edge computing autonomously.

We have the opportunity to make a substantial impact in our industry by meeting the need for efficiency, operational excellence and data-driven research innovation.

Learn More About Leveraging Cloud Environments to Enhance Oil Well Performance 

As oil and gas companies try to maintain their business processes while reducing fossil fuel emissions to meet environmental commitments, using innovative cloud computing technologies in the oil and gas industry like Akinê Live is more important than ever before.

If you’re interested in learning more about how cloud resources and artificial intelligence can improve performance in the energy sector from the people actively changing the game in North America’s energy industry, register for the next Global Energy Show today.