Silixa Ltd services

The intelligent Distributed Acoustic Sensor (iDAS), when coupled to an optical fibre, provides a versatile seismic acquisition platform capable of meeting many borehole seismic objectives.

Characterising fluid movement within the well can be the key to understanding and optimising well performance; Silixa’s intelligent Distributed Acoustic (iDAS) and Distributed Temperature Sensors (ULTIMA DTS) offer a means to efficiently gather production or injection profiles along the entire wellbore with minimal or no intervention.

Typically the optical fibre cable will be placed on the outside of the production casing on a plug and perforate completion which requires a specific installation technique and oriented perforation solution to ensure the cable is preserved throughout the completion phase and beyond. The optical fibres provide an in-situ sensor array that makes it possible to acquire temperature and true acoustic information at every point along the cable path. This is a unique sensing scenario where the introduction of other sensors such as on wireline is highly impractical in the treated well.

Well integrity can be summarised as the application of equipment and procedures to prevent the uncontrolled release of well fluids throughout the life of the well. This is achieved by including multiple well barriers into the well design, each of which must function normally to maintain the desired redundancy to ensure on-going well integrity.

Many of the in-well iDAS and DTS applications targeted at the upstream oil and gas industry are also a natural fit for CO2 well monitoring. Silixa have played an active part in the installation of fibre optic enabled monitoring systems for carbon capture and storage projects and continue to acquire data on several of these projects for a variety of reasons.

Temperature based leak detection is based on Silixa’s Distributed Temperature Sensor (ULTIMA DTS) offering multiple channel configurations up to 35 km per channel on either single mode or multimode fibre.

Acoustic detection technology is used to measure the acoustic signature comprising of the amplitude, frequency and phase at every point along the optical fibre. Silixa’s technology is able to discriminate multiple simultaneous third party intrusion events and locate them accurately along the pipeline. Events are detected and classified using a neural network processing architecture before a decision is made.