Mesquite Energy: 3 Ways Production Engineers Easily Drive Benefit with JOYN Oil & Gas Production

The Production Engineer builds the strategy to win the production game: what oil, gas, and water wells to target or abandon, and how to invest in the most productive initiatives. Using legacy systems, the engineering teams need weeks to prepare metrics and report them out to understand losses and where they might originate so that repairs can be done.

At Mesquite Energy and for Moises Garcia Production Data Manger, Production Engineering teams use JOYN as the single pane of glass to finally achieve a comprehensive, more accurate view of production metrics across all assets. This leads to earlier and more informed decision-making – in some cases shortening timeframes for access to reliable production metrics by a month or more. Imagine what production improvements could be made in a month’s time.

After working with Seven Lakes on a free trial of JOYN, Mesquite Energy was sold on its ability to cut the chaos for good. Now running 1800 of their water, oil and gas wells using the JOYN Oil & Gas Production system to manage field data gathering, daily allocations and reporting production, Mesquite is enjoying several benefits across the organization which we’ll highlight here in this post. To learn the benefits possible for other members of the organization, read this blog post on How Production Foremen cut the chaos.

As part of our latest “How to Cut the Chaos” webinar series, we spoke with three Production Engineering team members from Mesquite Energy: Moises Garcia, Production Data Manager, Harlan Hansel, Production Reporting Analyst and Cody Burrell, Operations Center Supervisor. We asked them how they use JOYN to cut the chaos, upgrade outdated processes that were slowing them down, and what unexpected benefits they can now rely on. Here’s what they told us.

Benefit #1: 95% Faster Allocation Process and Timely Communication Across Key Stakeholders

Prior to their free trial of JOYN, Mesquite had some significant challenges. First, providing timely and consistent data not only to Field personnel, but also to key stakeholders in Accounting and Management. And second, in finding an allocation engine that could crunch and measure huge volumes of complex allocation numbers for 1800 wells within minutes. In the past, using their legacy allocation system, daily allocation processing used to be always 30 – 40 days out. “We’re now (with JOYN) able to provide daily allocations to our Field personnel and our Engineers…within 48 hours. On top of that, the analytics engine allows us to be able to quickly slice and dice and review our data and quickly communicate that data across to various stakeholders.”

According to Moises Garcia, “We needed to consolidate everything under one system to be able to consistently provide our Operations personnel good quality data. Now, we have over 400 networks – oil, gas, and water networks – set up within JOYN. We can quickly run a full month of allocations for every system. We can do all of that and view our results in analytics within one hour…and one of the advantages of doing that is that now we’re able to catch and find a lot of our issues a lot faster.” And as we know, finding issues a lot faster means being able to assign repairs and get back to target production levels much faster.

Benefit #2: A Shift in Focus – from Constant Justification to Increasing Production

Cody Burrell, Operations Center Supervisor, explains, “One thing that we [say] in the field and have for a long time is, ‘you have to be able to measure it to manage it’. And we couldn’t do that in a timely manner before, so we were constantly having to play catch up with upper Management or even Field management asking us questions. If we’re reading an accurate measurement, you know we’re not going to have any questions, so we needed to put the information in front of Operators and in front of their Foreman and find the holes. Through JOYN, we were able to set up different reports…to help catch those things, and that ties back into the accountability from the field. We can’t hold Operators accountable if [they] can’t even see it.”

JOYN’s single view of the data (or as we call it, a single pane of glass) and lightning-fast allocation engine combined have changed all of that. No more time wasted in back-and-forth questions and finger-pointing. Instead, teams could focus on getting back on track, according to Garcia, and quite a bit faster: “Now with the power and speed of the system, the accountability has been shifted back to our Field Operators and we’re providing a 48-hour allocation every single day…that, in turn, is going to help them make better decisions with their wells, be able to communicate to Engineers. We’ve seen an immediate improvement as we continue to work through this…and we expect additional benefits such as continuing to increase the production via improved Field situational awareness and overall production data.”

Benefit #3: Field Visibility Delivers Opportunity for Production Optimization Today and in the Future

As a result of cultural and organizational change occurring over recent years, Mesquite’s team experienced a major transformation. Instead of looking upon all this change as a further challenge to face, they took it as an opportunity. Newly acquired assets would need to be carefully managed to produce to their potential, and the Production Engineering team knew that would require the need to redesign how things were done to directly impact production.

Mesquite looked at JOYN to help them achieve their vision of increasing field accountability that leads to an increase in production. “This whole process starts in the Field…Operators are frontline defense. They run the routes, every day, they do inspections, they conduct our well tests. They safely ensure that our production is stable and is continuing to improve. So, for our team on the ground to be successful, we have to provide the right tools, the right data, so they are empowered to always make the right decisions and have that full visibility of their production. Visibility into the performance of each oil and gas [well] is the key to optimize production.”

To learn more about how JOYN is helping improve production processes and optimization at Mesquite, watch the webinar, and check out our Cutting Through the Chaos webinar series.