Two Years Down the Road in Production with Downhole Flow Control Solution in SS Field, Offshore East Malaysia - Success Case Studies, Lesson-Learnt and Way Forwards

Developed amidst some of the most challenging offset brown fields in the S clusters offshore East Malaysia, SS field has undergone a rigorous drilling and completions campaign extending from Q4-2009 to Q1-2011(i.e. 15 months). 14 wells with downhole flow control solution plus 3 water injectors for long-term pressure maintenance were planned. A campaign of 12 ‘passive’ Inflow Control Devices, ICD’s wells and 2 ‘active’ cost-effective surface-controllable intelligent wells was executed with success. All wells are horizontal to optimize well counts in penetrating more layers and drainage across entire reservoir of approximate 40m thick oil column. However as predicted in the dynamic reservoir modeling, under the huge threat of a large and expanding gas cap (i.e. m size of 2) coupled with the underlying moderate aquifer strength of imposing water encroachment; all the wells, if completed without downhole flow control, will get early gas and/or water breakthrough in a matters of days/months with huge oil bypassed. Hence, the notions of smart and/or advance completions for downhole inflow control solution are to promote this field development into solving the predicted sub-optimal production in order to achieve the target recovery factor of at least 30% in this challenging multi-stalked, very heterogeneous and highly-dipping reservoir. In this paper, all the twelve (12) ICD’s wells plus the two (2) intelligent wells post-execution production analysis will be discussed. A post-mortem of the effectiveness of such innovative solution is performed to assess the production impact on SS field with some wells’ production data available more than two years’. From the good success case studies of the highperformance wells, post-production profiles have indicated a huge transformation towards realising more oil incremental while reducing the cost of handling less water and gas. However, lesson-learnt can also be drawn from a few of the so-called “Couldhave-been-better-performers”. This is then highlighted with the way forwards plan to both further sustain production and lookahead into applying the best practices of such technology pilots to other asset development and conceptual. This paper could provide an eye-opening insight into some of the best-kept value of downhole flow control application with actual production impact and data analysis.