Designing an Early Production Facility for a Marginal Oil Field to Boost the Economic Profitability of the Project

Abstract

Marginal fields’ reserves development is attached to the significant financial risks, which are catalyzed by time from discovery to an effect from investment. An option to decrease such risks is using the early production facilities (EPF), which allows producing the hydrocarbons in a quicker basis and monetizing the asset in a shortest timeline, compared to temporary facilities. EPF leads to accelerated operational decision-making that contributes to early payback with minimal financial outlay. Three modifications of early production facilities were used in this paper: three stage separators with relevant storage tanks and compressors. Among the three design configurations, the two-stage separation model is considered the best scenario from the economic and the technical perspective. One-stage separation was not suitable for our fluids condition due to the high pressure drop from the wellhead to the separator and remaining gas dissolved in oil after separation, which indicated that in order to increase the recovery factor and efficiency of the separation, we need to use more stages to get a purer product. The three-stage separation demonstrated almost the same performance (extra two barrels of oil) as the two-stage option: desired quality, state of the fluids and efficiency was obtained; an extra investment would not be profitable. When the number of separators increased the efficiency and RF of the separation increased. EPF and permanent facilities were compared utilizing economic evaluation and risk analysis. It was found that EPF showed more attractive profitability indicators: NPV (SP) 132.81 $MM, IRR (SP) 42.93%, and NPV (FP) 513.24 $MM. The Permanent facilities had a significant negative effect on the economic criteria. Selection of the EPF will lead to early profit with less risk, reducing the time to start production due to parallel design, fabrication and site preparation.