--> Surface & Subsurface Integrated Planning in a Brown Field; In the Sultanate of Oman; Safeguarding the Future HCM Opportunities

AAPG Middle East Region GTW, Maximizing Asset Value: Integrating Geoscience with Reservoir Management & Facilities Optimization

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Surface & Subsurface Integrated Planning in a Brown Field; In the Sultanate of Oman; Safeguarding the Future HCM Opportunities

Abstract

The brown field considered is one of the most challenging fields in Petroleum Development Oman in terms of the execution of Field Development Plans (FDP’s). It has various overlying reservoirs where every reservoir has its own individual FDP that do not necessarily integrate with the opportunities of the other FDP’s. In addition, these FDP’s have been changing through the long development period of the field in order to capture the continuous changes in the reservoirs behavior as well as to capture the new technologies and accordingly more wells were planned and drilled and this is expected to continue at least for the next 20 years if we were to develop the field to its ultimate recovery. Well planning challenges in this field are no less complex than any other brown field in the world, especially when combining surface, subsurface, and drilling challenges. Surface challenges are not only the existence of well heads and flow lines but naturally complex as the topography with its mountains and channels add significantly to its surface complexities. The subsurface challenges are with both or either with reservoir target drainage zone or with existing well paths and therefore planning new wells is challenging due to well placement or collision risk. This project aims to resolve the issue through integrated well planning of a number of wells in a batch of planned opportunities in a window of several years. The integration was implemented by gathering the surface and the subsurface data in a single working environment where the well planning workflows (surface location pick, trajectory generation, and anti-collision analysis) were integrated utilizing the available data. This helps optimizing the well plans by adjusting locations and trajectories to accommodate all existing and planned wells of the short and long-term business cycles. The final results showed that continuing the current practice of single well planning will impact the future recovery where many of the defined future opportunity may not be executable; hence an integrated well planning for longer periods is the only option. In addition, an integrated asset development plan is to be written incorporating all the multiple FDP’s of the field.