No abstract

Water production often has a big impact on limiting oil production from prolific wells, especially those supported by aquifers. When it comes to deep High Pressure, High Temperature (HPHT) wells, managing water production becomes even more complicated due to the challenges that limit downhole tool functionality, made even more complex when the source of water is from a channel behind the casing. A limited number of solutions are available for scenarios such as these. The subject well is located offshore in the Gulf of Suez and was drilled in 2010 to a depth of 14000 ft with a downhole temperature of 320°F and a reservoir pressure of 5700 psi. Due to complicated hole stability issues after drilling the 6 in hole, a 5 in liner could not be run to the well Total Depth (TD), so a 3 ½ in liner was run for over 1500 ft of the 6 in open hole section. This situation was far from ideal for a good cementing job, with the result being that the 3 ½ in liner was mostly uncemented, free pipe. Despite the selective perforating being carried out a long way from the Oil-Water Contact (OWC), water production kept increasing until it reached 95% in 2022. Saturation and production logs run in 2011 & 2017 showed that most water was coming from high-quality zones through cement channels behind the liner. Isolating the water source was considered; however, there would have been a high risk of damaging oil-bearing zones if conventional techniques were used. With emerging technologies and evolving chemistries gaining more reliability in the field, a team started to evaluate the various options to shut off the water production from behind the liner and rank them in terms of water isolation likelihood, operational risk & risk of damaging oil-bearing zones. The study focused on three possible solutions; shallow penetration polymer sealants, relative permeability modifiers (RPMs), and remedial cement operations. Coiled Tubing (CT) was chosen as the conveyance method to deliver the solution. The result of the study concluded that a specific design and procedure using shallow penetration modified, organically crosslinked polymer (m-OCP) system with a high content of properly sized Loss Circulation Material (LCM) would succeed in blocking water zones and bridge the oil-bearing zones for later recovery with selective re-perforation. The operation was carried out in September 2022 and successfully isolated 3000 BWPD while increasing well production by 2500 BOPD. In addition, the well started to flow naturally, saving the need for lift gas to use on other wells and decreasing the scaling risk in the well. A cost saving of approximately $1M was achieved in remediating this well. The alternative of efficiently drilling a new well to recover oil from the top low permeability zone would be estimated at $16M. Shallow penetration polymer sealants can be a cost-effective option to treat flow behind casing in challenging conditions. Expanding to an entire field could significantly increase production and maximize zonal recovery.

Gas Lift has been applied in the oil field for more than 70 years, despite the new technology and developments there is always more optimization that can be done. In this paper we are giving a leading example of one of the oldest gas lift projects in gulf of Suez that has been running for more than 50 years where 540 MMSCFD being pumped on daily basis to produce more than 200 wells as of today. the experience in this field is quite historical but the question is always persisting are we making best use of lift gas volumes and pressure, does every well have the optimum design and receives the optimum gas lift rate. One more important question will be how to prioritize interventions and optimization operations to target wells with highest value. In order to assess the overall gas lift performance of the field an innovative dashboard was created including Key performance indicators that reflect benchmarking of Lift Gas Consumption compared with historical Performance of the field. This should spot the light to the field with lowest efficiency and most probably it is expected higher return of production if we dedicate efforts to this field. Moreover creating wells dashboard has valued new Key Performance indicators with New Diagnostic Graphs that was not given attention by the industry before. Having these diagnostic Plots allowed benchmarking performance of wells for similar reservoir, completion type, gas lift design and sand face completion. Using this technique, it became easy to detect wells with higher potential of production with proper gas lift intervention. Although Analytics can give some guidance on the required actions to enhance production of wells knowing the basic design, having the analytics coupled with Integarated Network modelling and well models added more value to the project. Data Driven Gas Lift Optimization approach was applied since Oct. 2021 in an extensive approach over GOS, the approach succeeded to define more than 74 Optimization and Intervention Opportunities 45 of them were actually intervened in less than a year and added more than 4000 BOPD to production capacity. It was not a surprise that some of historically known underperforming wells were interpreted underperforming for other reasons than gas lift in-efficiency but using Gas lift Analytics re-analysis of the system showed huge value for gas lift intervention in these wells and succeeded to revive them. Data Analytics and Data driven gas lift optimization is proved a huge leap in managing gas lift fields and keeping the system running closer to optimum.