Malaysia Deepwater Development: Optimizing Kikeh Reservoir Management and Exploitation in a Changing Environment
Authors: Masoudi Rahim , Karkooti Hooman , Chan Keng S. , Othman Mohamad B. , Burford Steve , Sarginson Marcus , Till Vaughn , Bee Philip , Chenery Dale 
Published: March 2015

Deep water fields are subject to higher development costs than more conventional field developments and often have challenging topside and subsurface issues and uncertainties. The level of heterogeneity, compartmentalization, fault intensity, reservoir connectivity, pressure and flow communication across the field, sand/fine production, wellbore stability are commonly less understood at the time the development decision is made. The reservoirs may also consist of very thin beds (cm thick) to thick blocky sands and the reservoir properties / connectivity can vary significantly both laterally and vertically throughout the field.

This paper describes a deepwater case study offshore Malaysia, and in particular the challenges of optimizing deepwater Reservoir Management / development in a changing development environment. As a result of some early well failures and associated sand production, TesTrak© pressure data acquired during re-drilling some of the wells has provided an invaluable insight into the complexities of deepwater reservoir development and thin vs thick bed recovery efficiencies. This has led to further development optimization such as the deployment of SMART water injection completions and dedicated thin bed high angle wells as required to solve specific by-passed oil targets.

In this paper, the above challenges and reservoir management (RMP) requirements combined with the concerns of the optimized water flooding in a complex deep water field in Malaysia have been studied and discussed.

Project Background

The K field example is a deepwater development located in 1330 meters water depth offshore Sabah, Malaysia. The field was discovered by the K-1 well drilled to a depth of 3600m in 2002 and marked the start of deepwater development in Malaysia. Development was sanctioned and initiated at a time of relatively low oil price (&lt;25$/bbl), initially focussing on the thickest, most continuous reservoirs. As a consequence of oil price, the most cost effective solutions to bring the field onstream were adopted. The current oil price environment is enabling these assumptions to be challenged, and new technologies can be applied.

The field has been developed via combined subsea and SPAR (dry-tree) infrastructure, and has pressure support via combined water and gas re-injection. Production of first oil occurred on schedule in 2007. The K field has marked a number of firsts in the industry and for Malaysia oilfield development, in the areas of construction & use of facilities, these are documented together with some of more development and production challenges and solutions in earlier publications [1–5].

This successful deepwater development was achieved in collaboration between Murphy Oil Corporation, partners PETRONAS Carigali and PETRONAS Nasional Berhad (PETRONAS), plus all the service company personnel and has resulted in significant deepwater technology transfer into Malaysia. The FPSO, SPAR, FTL and subsea manifolds were all fabricated in Malaysia, in addition a portion of the subsea trees were assembled locally as well.