Horizontal wells with extended reach drilled in Ghawar field awarded significant improvements, maximizing hydrocarbon production and attained ultimate recoveries. Over the life of those wells, intervention work is necessary to maintain hydrocarbon production by conducting remedial action, such as acid stimulation or water shut off. Necessary data for decision making can be obtained through running surveillance tools, which has proved to be a challenge, considering that these sensors will have to be deployed to total depth (TD). Many well intervention methods have been developed over time to overcome these challenges, such as coiled tubing (CT) and several types of wireline tractors. Wireline tractor technology has evolved to reduce time, cost and improve data quality and increase wellbore coverage. The use of a wireline tractor imposes fewer personnel on the job, much less equipment and less lifting of heavy loads resulting in a smaller footprint impacting the environment. In addition, the fast rig up of the wireline tractor and the running in hole (RIH) and pulling out of hole (POOH) speeds the highly deviated section, and cuts down on operating time. This paper will demonstrate horizontal logging experience gained from trial testing a new deployment solution for the production logging tool (PLT). A new generation of wireline tractors was utilized successfully to deploy the PLT for the first time in the Saudi Arabian field and showed exceptional performance. The tractor proved its capability to overcome different challenging wellbore conditions, such as rugosity, washouts, and high dogleg severity (DLS). Moreover, the tractor was able to efficiently pass through very short sections with large changes in the inclination and azimuth, This paper also covers the whole cycle of candidate selection, job design, execution challenges, post job evaluation, lessons learned and experience gained to optimize similar future jobs.

Wells with extended-reach multilaterals have improved reservoir contact and have opened the opportunity for well-placement and -drilling optimization. Since the early 2000s, the number of maximum-reservoir-contact wells has increased substantially, and the benefit of these wells is being realized at the early implementation stage. To enhance the performance of these multilateral wells, intervention operations in the laterals are required. Stimulation, data acquisition, and other operations are required to optimize the production from the laterals; however, accessing the lateral of any wellbore for intervention in a reliable manner is still a challenge. The present paper describes the development of an intelligent, real-time controllable tool, the well-lateral-intervention tool (WLIT), that can identify a lateral junction and steer an intervention/surveillance string into it. The WLIT is designed to be deployed by use of either coiled tubing or e-line (with the help of a well tractor for extended-reach horizontal deployment) for logging and/or stimulation purposes. This application provides the ability to increase the quantity and quality of information collected from the entire well-main bore and the multiple laterals individually-to obtain the best answer. The discussion is dedicated to the development stages of the tool and field-trialtest results. The WLIT has two versions. The first version is called "wired," which accommodates specific logging tools that are compatible with the WLIT design, whereas the second version, "wireless," allows the use of all types of logging-tool strings from any third-party provider. The test results highlight both versions of the tool. The WLIT sensory equipment and the control environment are described, and results from the field-trial tests are presented.

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