Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014

Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; This paper highlights some of the reasons for the oil production decline in petroleum wells and underlies principles to produce a new model for the oil wells’ production performance. The research starts by introducing some information about the available world energy resources which shows that petroleum and natural gas are used more than any other energy sources. The research also presents further information about the productivity index of oil producing wells and their performance including how this is affected and how it can be enhanced using different available methods. The total world oil reserves, gap in production and demand and how this research is important for increasing the oil production is explained. The analysis shows that a 15.47% increase in the oil reserves between the years 2008 and 2012 had caused the total world oil reserves to increase from 1,280,114 million barrels in 2008 to reach 1,478,211 million barrels in 2012. The research has showed that the additional 198,097 million barrels are sufficient to cover the world's demand for oil for about six years based on the rate of oil demand in 2012 of 32,459 million barrels. However, the total world's oil production in 2012 is 26,611 million barrels which is not enough to meet the demand. Therefore, the aim of this research is to find suitable methods for producing oil from the available oil reserves to cover the demand by reducing the losses in the oil producing wells rather than depleting the newly found reserves. However, this research is still ongoing and it is expected to give more interesting and valuable results in the futur