Reviving Idle Wells and Unlocking Potential Production Gain in Offshore Sarawak Through Exposing BCO-LRLC Opportunities

Abstract

Brownfield in Balingian and Baram Delta have handful of idle wells and well to be abandoned in their inventories. The project aims to reduce the idle well inventories and support production gain through monetizing behind casing opportunities. The target is to appraise and develop LRLC potentials with lower cost of appraisals. This will maximize full field potentials before abandonment and leads to future development of LRLC opportunities as conventional reservoir becomes more difficult to develop. The idle well inventory has grew up due to problem in production (increase water cut, HGOR) and well problems (sand, fish). An order has been introduced to reduce the idle well list up to 50%. Additionally, in the past, the LRLC intervals were often ignored and considered as water-wet sands due to high water saturation or as tight sands. These intervals, that contain significant reserves, are recognized in many technical papers explaining its identification and evaluation techniques from well-data (logs and samples/cores). The scope of the project is to rejuvenate the idle wells by add-perf LRLC reservoirs. It is impossible to achieve the target without the presence of proper and improved LRLC BCO evaluation process, thus an integrated workflow approach (between Petrophysicist, Reservoir Engineer, Production Technologist, Asset manager & Well Intervention group) has been developed and applied in the project. A new evaluation tools had also been developed called REM (Resolution Enhanced Modelling) in order to improve the log properties of LRLC reservoirs so that the data obtained from old conventional tools can still be used to evaluate LRLC reservoir. Although LRLC is termed UNSEEN, the risk is reduced by proper understanding of hydrocarbon column and sand development. To date, 7 fields are already benefitted from this approach. Field A LRLC reservoir for example has tripled the hydrocarbon saturation, and net to gross has improved to 20% using REM compare to 5% without REM. The other 6 fields are also gaining the same increase in the properties. This has resulted in a cumulative potential of 4.4 MMstb of reserves addition and ~11 KBopd potential gain. As a result, a better and attractive BCO proposals can be generated from LRLC opportunities. The exercise will provide the company with cheaper options of appraising and developing LRLC reservoir while reducing the idle wells. There is no better way of understanding LRLC reservoir; as no tools can identify & quantify it yet, rather from the actual production.