In April 2010 we were reminded that Drilling operations are amongst the most hazardous in the world, having the potential for Major Incidents, with the Deepwater Horizon rig fire and explosion. This incident resulted in 11 lives being lost, almost 5,000,000 million barrels of oil being spilt into the Gulf of Mexico over an 87 day period and significant financial loss for bp. This Major Incident also served to remind us that while traditional "Personal Safety" programs are important to achieve safe drilling operations, these alone cannot effectively manage Major Incident Hazards. E&P Operations can learn valuable lessons from the Process Industry in this regard. This paper looks at how "Process Safety Management" implementation, aimed at reducing the potential for Major Incidents, has commenced at an onshore E&P operation. It also discusses the challenges of integrating the culture of Process Safety into existing company culture for operations involving over 60 land rigs comprising both local and international Drilling Contractors and Service Companies. Process Safety Management system is used to describe those parts of an organisation’s management system intended to prevent major incidents arising out of the production, storage and handling of dangerous substances (UK HSE, 2012). It addresses the potential release of these substances caused by: Mechanical FailuresProcess UpsetsProcedures/Human Error.

Kuwait Oil Company is the premier oil & gas Company in the Gulf region involved in exploration and production of oil & gas reserves. The Company established 2030 vision to increase the production capacity by two folds. The also established an intergrated health, safety and environmental management system (HSMES) to achieve 2030 targets in a sustainable manner. The company faces many challenges in implementation of HSEMS. One of the main challenge is the diverse workforce. The company engages number of contractors, who in turn employees Workforce from more than 65 countries around the World. The workforce are highly diverse in nature and comes with different background, different languages, different skill set and it is altogether big challenge for the Company to achieve HSE (Health Safety & Environment) targets. The company adopts variety of methods in implementing the HSE Management by involving this diverse workforce. The speaker is involved in this process and played a key role. The presentation will share Company experience in achieving HSE targets under diverseworkforce. This is part of the best practices sharing among the global HSE community.

Produced fluids, from a tight deep carbonate reservoir extended laterally from West to South East Kuwait experienced severe asphaltene deposition along production tubing. This flow assurance challenge significantly increases well operating cost, risk and production deferment periods due to frequent Coiled Tubing (CT) cleaning jobs using considerable amount of expensive organic solvents. This flow assurance challenge is caused mainly due to the absence of any of strong reservoir aquifer support, continuous decline in reservoir pressure and high draw down across this tight reservoir in order to meet production targets. The objective of this pilot trial was to provide a long term solution with redundancy feature to convey chemicals safely from surface to down-hole through capillary tubes and pressure regulated chemical injection valves. Different techniques have been introduced since 1980 including batch chemical squeeze treatment, coated tubulars and Radio Frequency Vibration tools. Results of these trials have shown either short term production gain or no improvement on asphaltene build-up rate and well productivity. In order to dynamically mitigate this challenge, a dual in-situ chemical injection system was installed to convey chemicals deep inside the well on a continuous basis. The system was successfully installed and has provided a safe & reliable field qualifying tool to verify chemical performance at different injection parameters. The novelty of this technology is the ability to provide a continuous asphaltene management system to achieve production sustainability using dual injection conduits and down-hole pressure regulated valves utilizing relatively small amount of chemicals. This paper highlights the adopted approach of continuous asphaltene management system from hardware design & installation prospective to chemical qualifying process in the field and also shed light on the pilot trial lessons learned.

This paper describes a dynamic modelling and optimization study to investigate the viability of deploying intelligent completions for well management in a mature oilfield in order to mitigate the challenges of increasing water cut and rapid diminishing of surface locations for new wells across the Greater Burgan field. Reservoir simulation is used to assess the potential benefits of installing Flow Control Valves (FCVs) in a candidate well, to control production from multiple reservoir zones. A representative sector model is defined around the candidate well, to include surrounding wells that could influence its flow behaviour. Reservoir properties are extracted from a fine-scale geological realization and updated using current well logs. Sensitivity studies are performed to determine the appropriate size and grid design for simulation. The well is planned to be completed across six producing reservoir zones with a single tubing and an Electrical Submersible Pump (ESP). In the optimization strategy, the FCV aperture openings are adjusted over the lifetime of the well, to maximize the Net Present Value, while meeting operational and strategic constraints. The robustness of the forecast outcomes are highly dependent on the quality of reservoir characterization. A sector model large enough to represent the effects of reservoir heterogeneities and interference from other wells, was used. The efficient optimization workflows used here can be generalized for similar analyses of other wells and other fields. The optimized results demonstrate that installation of FCVs can help to meet the simultaneous objectives of boosting oil production while reducing water production. This is achieved by choking back the deeper high-water production zones to accelerate oil production from the upper high oil saturation zones, while also targeting offtake to induce the shallower low-pressure zone to deliver more. The large initial capital outlay, comprising the equipment and service cost of the FCV installation is fully offset within the first year of production, post installation. This study highlights the significant upside benefits for the management of complex brown fields such as the Greater Burgan by adopting smart well completion strategy. Improving well production performance, and supporting multi-zone completions, should also enable reduction of well counts for fields with existing high well density and lack of surface space to accommodate many new dispersed wells.