The Effect of Unplanned Shutdown to World’s Largest Steamflood Project, Duri Field Indonesia

Abstract

The Duri field, operated by Chevron under a production sharing contract with Government of Indonesia, is located in Riau province of central Sumatra about 120 km northwest of the city of Pekanbaru. The Duri Steamflood (DSF) Project is the largest Steamflood project in the world. Duri field was discovered in 1941 and start producing with primary production in 1958. Steamflood project started in 1985 and reached the peak production of 300,000 barrels oil per day later on late year 1994. Many well technologies have been applied, related to producer well completion and sand control, injector well completion, artificial lifts, and horizontal drilling to optimize the oil recovery. Heat management process was established to manage the steam injection efficiently. The DSF project was developed from Area-1 until Area-12 with different pattern sizes and configurations. The pattern sizes range from 5.5 acres to 15.5 acres. Pattern configurations vary and consist of 5-spot inverted 7-spot inverted and 9-spot inverted patterns. The DSF plans for further expansion to northern part of Duri field by developing new areas and other areas such as Duri "Ring", the area surrounding the existing producing field. Until 1998, steam was generated using oil as fuel but in year 2000, generators were converted to natural gas. The gas consumption reaches 414 MMscfd and mostly supplied from neighbored production sharing contractor ConocoPhillips using 28 inch x 530km pipeline transmission operated by 3rd party. On 29 September 2010, when DSF was producing 190,000 barrels oil per day, a failure event occurred that resulted in a release of gas from the pipeline. The accident cut the gas supply to DSF, caused the shutdown of steam generation facilities, and forced the world’s largest steamflood project to shut some of the producer wells for several days. This incident was the first "no-steam" incident to Duri steamflood project operation. The impact was severe. Production dropped to 58,000 barrel oil per day, and gradually increased back after the gas supply was ramped-up to normal levels. The gas supply was ramped-up and back to normal in 25 days. The production ramped-up, reached the peak slightly lower than before the event and production is continuing to recover with different mode where the decline is lower than before the incident. After the initial incident, there were other events, related to gas supply issues and interruptions of steam supply from cogeneration plant (COGEN) that have negatively impacted the production recovery. This paper shows the on-going massive efforts of Chevron and Government of Indonesia to bring the world’s largest steamflood project to full recovery and sustainably rejuvenate the Duri Field production.

Study on optimization and mechanism of CO2 injection to enhance oil recovery in mid-deep heavy oil reservoirs

“…However, the average recovery rate of these heavy oil reservoirs is less than 20%, indicating a vast potential for exploitation. Due to the high content of asphaltenes and resins, heavy oil is characterized by high viscosity and poor flow properties (Alcazar-Vara et al, 2012;Dong et al, 2013;Varfolomeev et al, 2022), making it difficult to develop effectively using conventional methods such as water flooding.…”

“…At present, the development of heavy oil reservoirs mainly focuses on thermal recovery methods such as steam huff-n-puff (Shen et al, 2005;Wan et al, 2020;Sun et al, 2022), steam flooding (Prats, 1992;Gael et al, 1995;Sutadiwiria and Azwar, 2011;Carpenter, 2018), Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) (Wu et al, 2013;Zhou and Zeng, 2014;Velayati and Nouri, 2020), and fire flooding (Xi et al, 2013;Guan et al, 2017a). These methods are predominantly utilized in developing shallow to mid-depth heavy oil reservoirs.…”

Heavy Oil Potentials in Central Sumatra Basin, Indonesia Using Remote Sensing, Gravity, and Petrophysics Data: From Literature Review to Interpretations and Analyses

“…In the Central Sumatra Basin, heavy oil's presence is indeed not something new. The large Duri field was discovered in 1941 with peak production of around 300,000 barrels of oil per day (BOPD) in 1994 (Sutadiwiria & Azwar, 2011;Winderasta et al, 2018).…”