fax 01-972-952-9435. AbstractSabiriyah Mauddud (SA MA), a super giant depletion drive oil reservoir in North Kuwait (NK), is undergoing massive development efforts, with a planned enhancement in oil production through phased pattern waterflood. The Phase1 development covers the crestal area of the structure, which is the focus for current development efforts through 12 inverted 9-spot patterns. This paper outlines the successful integration of subsurface, water handling, well surveillance and production operations teams across the NK asset to significantly improve the operating procedure for waterflooding the SA MA reservoir. This effort required a new way of managing this reservoir in NK: a comprehensive approach of balancing voidage with injection, conducting extensive surveillance/analysis within the reservoir to assess the efficacy of various courses of action and, most significantly, adjusting various teams' "key performance indicators" to align injection and production allowables with sound reservoir management principles.The health of the waterflood is regularly checked and monitored through revision of production/injection allowable and pattern balancing. An innovative unified information management system was used to monitor voidage replacement ratio (VRR) to provide a basis for pattern balancing. A very extensive surveillance operation provides the data necessary to monitor individual pattern balance and watercut performance, optimize areal sweep efficiency by adjusting injection and production allowables, assist in planning water shutoff operations, and design new completions.Time lapsed monitoring and the surveillance data indicates the reservoir is relatively well connected. Pattern VRR, pressures, and watercuts were somewhat out of balance prior to engaging in this effort. However, after applying the new management approach, individual waterflood pattern balance is significantly improved and the field-wide VRR is around 1.2.All of these activities have led to the enhanced understanding of the waterflood behavior and the model updates. Sound reservoir surveillance and waterflood management procedures implemented within a diverse group of teams that have performance goals aligned with "best practice" has resulted in effectively re-balancing this major waterflood. This effective integration of teams retains the flexibility to adjust for an ongoing development of this super giant field. This paper also brings out the case history of waterflood management in a super giant carbonate reservoir and the challenges met during the last seven years since the commissioning of the waterflood in year 2000.

KOC undertook a major leap in its FDP expansion programme by a very comprehensive Miscible Gas EOR feasibility screening review of the North Kuwait (NK) Sabiriya and Raudhatain oil fields. This paper will highlight the major findings of the Phase 1 of this project executed in 2008. Phase 1 evaluated available resources and data required for implementation of an EOR Pilot followed by a full field implementation. Main emphasis was to evaluate EOR injectant supply options and identify a most-likely first source with the associated risks. The workscope encompassed 4 major task items: ▪Investigate and rank alternative injectants for technical/economic feasibility, recovery efficiency & local availability point of view:–CO2-the quality, quantity, usability from the industries, factories, power-plants.–Mixtures of CO2 & NGL from Jurassic Condensate–Feasibility of other methods such as water-alternating-gas (WAG) or nitrogen (N2) injection–Evaluate the Heavy Oil Project emissions as injectants.▪Review PVT EOR laboratory studies conducted by KOC to date. Screen data for consistency and representativeness for PVT/EOS modeling in Phase-2 sector/pattern reservoir simulation work. Characterize fluid property variation vertically and areally. Make recommendations.▪Review the completion and facilities for suitability in a CO2 & other injectant environment. Provide a first pass assessment of the associated gross economics to implement EOR scenarios that may require changes/uprgades to the surface facilities and/or completions.▪Review coreflood SCAL studies, solubility and miscibility tests including WAG. Compare waterflood and immiscible/miscible tertiary gasflood relative permeability experiments. Establish the need for carbonate rock leaching experiments for CO2 injection. Establish the need for asphaltene precipitation experiments for heavy API grades. The study identified pure CO2 and CO2/NGL mixtures as the most plausible miscible gas options worth pursuing a pilot study. For each Miscible Injectant type, the source options & supply volumes and the CAPEX and OPEX cost estimates were established. Semi- analytical recovery models were used to evaluate the EOR recovery efficiencies of the individual reservoirs, net injectant requirements and product streams. The detailed EOR cost model was built using the actual KOC well and facility cost Database and CAPEX and O&M costs for the industrial sourced CO2. A preliminary economics was performed using input from both models above. A pilot project to demonstrate the feasibility of CO2 WAG was also proposed.

Ambitious leadership, integrated planning and availability of resources have seen unprecedented growth in development activities of North Kuwait reservoirs over the last 4-5 years. As a result of this production has significantly grown but so have production challenges. New ideas and ways to enhance production and reserve growths are being discussed and tested. In this context role of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) has been critically examined and steps are being taken to have a pragmatic action plan in place to achieve strategic objectives.North Kuwait has been endowed with a mix of clastic and carbonate reservoirs of that are highly productive. These reservoirs are at different stages of depletion and their development plans are constantly tuned to enhance oil production and reduce water cut. KOC's approach to EOR plans is inclusive. It is looking at not only mature clastic reservoirs like Lower Burgan but also at Mauddud, Upper Burgan and Zubair reservoirs that are in middle stage of their development bypassing the conventional route post-secondary recovery.Considering previous work and recent developments in the field of EOR, chemical methods and miscible Carbon-Di-Oxide (CO2) processes were shortlisted for more in-depth investigations. Subsequent extensive simulation studies place incremental oil recovery estimates using the results of specifically customized Surfactant Polymer (SP) formulation for Sabiriyah Mauddud in excess of 25% over the CO2 WAG (Water Alternating Gas) process. SPE 167281In view of the significance of these results to North Kuwait's production plan EOR program is being fast-tracked. It is now at a point where a pilot is being planned in Sabiriyah Mauddud to field-test KOC's first SP flood in the next 1-2 years. Action plan is being finalized with all activities, milestones and deliverables. The project activities are being closely monitored to ensure timely completion of key tasks by different groups. For other reservoirs risk-opportunity matrix is being developed to understand the pitfalls and potential of shortlisted methods. It is expected that this work plan will enable KOC to realize its vision of getting first EOR oil from North Kuwait by the turn of 2016.

A downhole fluid analysis prototype module (MRPV) has been developed which measures both asphaltene onset pressure (AOP) and bubblepoint pressure (Pb). This manuscript describes one of many recent downhole jobs which were part of a study to characterize live crude oil in real time while sampling mobile oil in a permeable tar mat. These jobs support an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) study to understand the best way to extract bypassed oil (Fatma 2019). In this manuscript, downhole bubblepoint and AOP measurements made with the MRPV in well RA-0Y37 agree with those obtained in a laboratory with bottomhole samples. The effect of oil-based mud contamination on the AOP and Pb is examined during clean up while sampling. Water was present for all jobs, but the hydrophobic membrane blocked water from entering the MRPV, facilitating ease of interpretation of optical data. This manuscript comprises the first part of a two-part series (Tiwari 2020).

Predicting the performance of individual oil wells is of great importance to petroleum engineering for continuous production optimization in the field. This study proposes a new Inflow Performance Relationships (IPR) for naturally fractured gas condensate reservoirs. Existing IPR models are commonly used for conventional solution gas drive reservoirs. The purpose will be to generate inflow performance relationships (well flowing pressure vs. flow rate) for naturally fractured condensate reservoirs as a function of the average reservoir pressure and fractured reservoir parameters including storage capacity (fracture storativity) and inter porosity flow parameter (interporosity flow coefficient). A dual porosity/dual permeability compositional equation of state simulator is used in this study. A regression program is used to fit the IPR curves and to obtain the corresponding equations. As a result, rational functions have been developed for the IPR curves for gas and oil phases. These correlations are functions of pressure drawdown and reservoir depletion. Additional correlations for predicting future maximum gas and oil rates were developed. The behavior of the future gas rate shows linear relationships between average reservoir pressure ratio and the maximum gas rate ratio. However, a highly non-linear behavior was observed for the oil phase. Additionally, fluid representing extreme types of condensates were also considered. Condensates with high fraction of light composition shows a hump and three distinct regions with different slopes in future maximum rate curves. In the other case where the composition of the condensate contains heavy components has shown nonlinear curves.