Agile FDP of Complex Brown Field Fast-Tracked by Digital Cloud Technologies
Authors: Bashir Aamir , Ab Wahab Muhammad Afiq , Seah Yong Han , Tan Yvonne , Dhal Subrat Kumar , Garimella Venkata Sai Subrahmanyam 
Published: October 2023

PETRONAS D Field, discovered in 1981, is a brownfield located offshore Terengganu, Malaysia in the West central part of Malay Basin. The field has been on production for over 30 years. It is an E-W trending anticline consisting of vertically stacked sandstone reservoirs segmented into several fault blocks, forming structural traps. The field has been producing primarily under a natural depletion drive supplemented by water and gas injection as an IOR strategy.

Several development campaigns have been carried out in the past where additional infill wells were drilled to improve recovery. Agile FDP has demonstrated the potential to recover an additional &gt;50MMSTB of oil. The key challenges to overcome were to 1) deliver the project in a tight timeframe which required comprehensive evaluation of infill proposals to ensure reserves attainability; 2) assess the risk in proposed infill wells in view of communication between fault blocks due to juxtaposition of stacked sands across fault planes 3) achieve a reasonable history-match in the presence of a large number of subsurface uncertainties and obtain a probabilistic forecast; 4) insufficient time to investigate full range of development scenarios due to the constraints of on-premises infrastructure.

These challenges are addressed by the PETRONAS LiveFDP digital transformation program, through deployment of digital cloud technologies and solutions with scalable High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment. The cloud-based native and Petrotechnical applications enable remote work, ensure full data auditability in an integrated E&P cognitive environment, enable large-scale probabilistic studies, and streamline the automated integration from Reservoir Engineering workflows to Economics Studies. The agile FDP workflows, enabled by unlimited HPC power, accelerate the subsurface studies and facilitate evaluation of a broad spectrum of development scenarios in an accelerated manner.

The agile Field Development Planning studies completed within two months using HPC cloud solutions and workflows compared to 1-year timeframe of using on-premises infrastructure. Utilizing cloud solutions and ensemble probabilistic approach, the team has:

Achieved project milestone of delivering first-oil one week ahead of the committed date and saved US$5 Million. Project delivered within sanctioned P80 cost and avoided NPT during drilling campaign. Performed detailed investigation into the impact of pressure depletion due to communication with adjacent fault blocks and with nearby "S" field through aquifer. Improved recovery of 0.7MMstb (~US$50 million) by optimizing well location and IOR injection scheme which improved sweep and pressure maintenance in the primary reservoirs. Conducted probabilistic studies of 40 uncertainty parameters by running 250 cases per ensemble in 2 days and significantly improved history-match (over 90% matched quality). Safeguarded 11 MMstb reserves with total project investment of US$328 million and realized additional 350bopd (18% higher than what was pledged in the development plan).