Case Study: SmartSahara |
Real-Time Automation Proves Itself Across Three Wells on One Permian Basin Pad
Location: Permian Basin, Texas | 30-Day Flowback Job, Three Wells
The Problem:
Timer-based blowdown systems run every well on a pad at the same fixed interval, whether that well is producing heavy sand or almost none. Calibrate the timer to the heaviest producer, and a low-sand well gets cycled needlessly, wearing valves and equipment for no reason. Calibrate it looser, and a sudden sand slug between scheduled cycles can overfill the vessel before the system ever reacts.
Either way, operators are left guessing when a well has actually cleaned up, without real data to back the call.
The solution:
SmartSahara, Powered by Rocsole, replaces the fixed timer with continuous, real-time vessel-level monitoring. Each well blows down only when its own vessel is actually full, not on a shared schedule. When a slug hits, the system detects the rising level and triggers the instant the setpoint is crossed, regardless of when the last blowdown happened.
No shared schedule, no guessing. Each well on the pad responds to its own real production in real time. A well producing almost no sand and a well in the middle of a slug event are never treated the same way.
The results:
Across three wells on one Permian Basin pad, monitored continuously for 30 days, SmartSahara detected and managed every documented sand slug automatically, protected the production stream throughout, and gave the operator a fully data-backed answer to when each well was actually clean.
Every slug, caught live. Five documented sand slug events across the pad were detected and managed automatically, with no operator intervention.- No wasted cycles. The pad's lowest-producing well triggered only 2 blowdowns across 10 days of active flow. A timer calibrated to the pad's dominant producer would have cycled it an estimated 90 times over the same window, roughly 88 unnecessary valve cycles avoided on a well that had almost no sand to remove.
- A cleanup curve backed by data. The dominant well's accumulation rate built through its first week of production, peaked at a mid-job median of roughly 50 lbs per hour, and declined to 1 to 5 lbs per hour by the end of the job, a full cleanup cycle documented start to finish.
- Proportional response, no manual recalibration. Every well responded to its own real production, from 238 blowdowns on the heaviest producer down to 2 on the lightest, with the system adapting automatically rather than running on a fixed schedule.
1/5
Slug Events Caught
~1 TONS
Sand Captured, Pad Total
20
Unnecessary Cycles Avoided
5 DAYS
Fully Automated Monitoring
See what real-time automation could do on your pad
Talk to EnerCorp about SmartSahara for your flowback operations.
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