Production Integrated Smart Completion Benchmark for Field Re-Development
Authors: Chan Keng Seng , Masoudi Rahim , Karkooti Hooman , Shaedin Ridzuan , Othman Mohamad B 
Published: March 2015

For marginal field development and mature field re-development, the main art of maximizing reservoir contact is to design wells that could enable commingle production simultaneously depleting not only the major but also the selected minor sands in the field. Field implementation cases in Malaysia have been shown that this could significantly minimize the well count, increase the well productivity, and improve the ultimate recovery per well particularly in the multiple-stacked and compartmentalized reservoirs.

Commingle production from several sands may have the risks and the uncertainties, among others, of layer cross-flow, excessive GOR production and early water breakthrough at certain sand intervals due to uneven pressure depletion, uneven gas and water mobility. These production risks and uncertainties shall be evaluated for ensuring the predicted life-cycle production performance of the designed commingles production wells. Minimization of these risks could involve developing of a pressure drawdown management plan, the optimization of injection fluid conformance control and the prediction of reservoir pressure change. The resulting pressure drawdown plan may then generate a requirement for individual down-hole flow control at each commingled sands.

Accordingly, the smart completion comprises of inflow control devices such as passive ICD and/or active ICV with or without down-hole pressure and inflow monitoring devices namely, PDG or DTS installation can then be adequately designed. This paper is to illustrate a production integrated smart well completion design process starting from reservoir drainage and injection points selection, the determination of well reservoir contact trajectory, the production evaluation and risk analysis, and to the selection and application of smart completion devices. The case of a deepwater reservoir field development smart well completion design was used to demonstrate the viability of this integrated engineering approach.

This approach is a partial effort to achieve effective field development by lowering the overall field development cost and maximizing the oil and gas recovery. The presented reservoir engineering workflows and completion design methodologies is to constitute a new smart well completion benchmark for well design and production optimization and serve as an engineering guide for optimizing the well construction cost in Malaysia.

Introduction

In Malayisa, oil and gas reservoirs can be classified into 3 main types, namely thin oil-rim, stacked, and compartmentalized reservoirs (Figure 1). Fields, shallow or deep, can have a structure which is the combination of these three types of the reservoirs. Field development often entails placement of the injection and production wells across several reservoir layers or zones of interest. Figure 2 shows a case of a horizontal well placement across several sands in a reservoir compartment bound by faults. In a deepwater reservoir with many stacked reservoir sands, a high angle well was designed for commingle production of 3 selected sands (Figure 3). These wells demonstrated that commingle production and injection from multiple sands could increase significantly the well productivity and EUR per wells, and could reduce the total well count for optimizing the field development.