Increasing Production Through an Innovative Analytical Approach in a Brown Field - A Case Study

Abstract

Early monetization of resources has become the key to have a competitive edge in our oil business today. In brownfields, this requires critical analysis of the existing performance, the sweep pattern, well drainage, and faster generation of robust cost effective redevelopment plan followed by rapid execution to get those early barrels. In Peninsular Malaysia BX is an oil rim reservoir with a large gas cap and moderate water drive. Oil production has declined rapidly in last few years with increasing GOR and water-cut. Existing models could not explain the current production behaviour. Apprehending building new models would take significant time, thus to arrest the unexpected decline in oil production, a classical reservoir engineering approach was adopted to identify bypassed oil and propose infill wells for additional production. With integration of production data, seismic, well logs and sand geometry, an innovative approach was used to find the less depleted areas. Well decline analysis, complemented by polygon balancing and normalised EUR bubbles at wells helped to identify locations where infill wells were proposed.The team deliberated the subsurface and operation risks and assessed them as internal or external risks, prioritised them and built a mitigation plan. These fast track infill wells without dynamic model were very successful in increasing production and reserves, and provided high economic returns due to reduced costs and early oil. The field oil production increased by more than 80%. This paper covers how the analytical approach with polygon balancing and normalised EUR bubbles was carried out to find the undrained areas. It also highlights challenges encountered during the planning and execution phases and the steps taken by the integrated team to overcome them. Encouraged by this success a number of this early monetisation projects were initiated which gave positive results thus proving the success of the technique.