Route Reviews

"We know about the 2.0 mmcfd hit from the plant downtime last week, but what else is happening on this route?"

You may know these as “production reviews”, “production analyses”, or other terms, but in my previous world, that producer called them “Route Reviews”. Once a quarter, we gathered our engineer, foreman, superintendent, and the relevant lease operators to sit down in the conference room and evaluate 2 “sister” routes. One operator would pull up a 1-year trend of production (Gas/Oil/Water) in our production accounting software, while the other operator did the same with pressures (tubing/casing/pipeline). We went well by well, looking for anomalies. If water was steady, and oil/gas met or beat our desired decline rate, and pressures reflected that, we moved on quickly. If anything looked out of line, we would zoom in and discuss what had been happening with that well. The result was a clean organized punch list with the proper person being assigned tasks in their wheelhouse. Often it was chasing down a 10psi increase in pipeline pressure or trying a different plunger to pick up a 15 mcfd loss from 2 months ago, but sometimes it was doing a high-volume flush or a clean-out with a WO rig. To me, this ~2 hours every quarter was one of the most important uses of our time to keep our field production on target. What do your formal production reviews look like, and how often do you schedule them? Do the operators get a seat at the table too?