Successful Infill Realized through Prudent Brownfield Oil Rim Reservoir Management, Offshore Malaysia

Managing an oil rim type reservoir has constantly been a great challenge and understanding the oil rim movement has remained as one of the main subsurface uncertainties. Prudent reservoir management through an active reservoir, well and facilities management (RWFM) plan is key to realizing the uncertainties, optimizing production and reserves of brownfields. Monitoring the oil rim through cased-hole reservoir saturation logging has been identified as a de-risking method, planned and executed for two consecutive years in the field to minimize the oil rim uncertainty. The field studied is one of the brownfields in offshore Sarawak, Malaysia, which has been on production for more than 40 years. Results acquired from the cased-hole logs have triggered the need to optimize the location of an infill oil producer planned in the Field Development Plan. The cased-hole results indicated that the original oil target in the N reservoir had mostly been swept by water. Through thorough studies and modeling, an opportunity to the western flank in M reservoir, located close to a proposed workover well, was suggested. Furthermore, latest input on the proposed workover well and facilities health check suggested the workover candidate was not favourable due to its location on an aging single well monopod structure with complex well mechanical problems. Thus, the planned infill oil producer was recommended to replace the workover well and recover the reserves. Integrated studies incorporated cased-hole results with reservoir modeling indicated that the new infill location would yield a total of 5.7MMSTB reserves with initial production rate of 1215BOPD. In addition, through integration of a multi-disciplinary team, revision to the infill location was timely and the infill was also accelerated from Phase II to Phase I of the development plan as a rig filler for cost optimization. Well test result successfully validated the reservoir productivity of 1238BOPD with no water production. This paper presents the integrated subsurface and surface solutions and criticality of proactive data acquisition, field monitoring and collaborative team work strategies to maximize the recovery from a brownfield.