New Levels in Technology: Seizing the Moment
Authors: Langley Diane 
Published: February 2015

At a time when the industry faces unprecedented demand and extraordinary challenges, participants in the 2005 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition (ATCE) will find a mammoth array of new technology and industry wisdom. This year’s event, “Knowledge Shared,” is all about striving to reach new levels in every operating arena. The conference will take place 9–12 October at the Dallas Convention Center.

Selected by the SPE ATCE Program Committee from more than 530 upcoming pre-sentations, the following four papers exemplify industry initiatives and demonstrate the expansive topics on this year’s technical agenda. An assessment of how the fate of 160 wells led to the development of highly useful flux-based guidelines for Na Kika’s sand-control completions; a testament to use of novel techniques and exceptional field execution to streamline deepwater completions like Marco Polo; an update from Chevron on the road from corporate vision to an actual digital oil field; and a compelling case of common process with an online integrated project-management application promise to improve the industry’s rapidly changing and increasing knowledge base.

Setting Safe Maximum Producing Rates

The best of all worlds, particularly on a deepwater development such as Na Kika, is to meet targeted production rates without unnecessarily compromising long-term sand-control reliability. To achieve this objective, Shell and BP jointly developed the Na Kika offtake guidelines by using a blending of recent sand-control operational methodologies from each company. This paper focuses on the use of the Bpflux (a registered trademark of bp plc) guidelines, which provide the maximum safe operating rates for sand-control completions using a C-factor that is directly proportional to the perforation velocity. This C-factor allows wells with excellent completion quality to produce at twice the rate of wells with unknown or poor completion quality.

The Na Kika development includes five subsea fields in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GOM) and is jointly owned by Shell and BP. All 10 wells in the Na Kika development have sand-control completions; two are openhole horizontal wells with gravel packs, and eight are cased holes with frac packs. There is also a wide variety of completion types. One field has two openhole horizontal wells with 1,500-ft laterals that are oil wells. The other eight wells are cased-hole frac packs, with three triple-stacked completions, two stacked completions, and three singles, for a total of 16 separate frac-pack completions. There are three gas and seven oil wells. Four of the cased-hole wells have intelligent completions.

“We have powerful new methods to safely operate high-profile sand-control completions,” said author Richard Keck. “Application of the guidelines at Na Kika has yielded substantial incremental production and helped keep the field at plateau rates much longer than was planned.”

This paper offers an overview of the new guidelines and demonstrates how they were used during the life of the field, including well planning, during well startup, and later, when wells have increasing skin. The authors also present a review of the actual Na Kika completion quality, examining those elements of completion design and execution that correlate with the measured skins.