Malaysia Deepwater Development: Optimizing the Reservoir Management in a Changing Environment

Deep water fields are subject to higher development costs than more conventional field developments and often have challenging topside and subsurface issues and uncertainties. The level of heterogeneity, compartmentalization, fault intensity, reservoir connectivity, pressure and flow communication across the field, sand/fine production, wellbore stability are commonly less understood at the time the development decision is made. The reservoirs may also consist of very thin beds (cm thick) to thick blocky sands and the reservoir properties / connectivity can vary significantly both laterally and vertically throughout the field. This paper describes a deepwater case study offshore Malaysia, and in particular the challenges of optimizing deepwater Reservoir Management / development in a changing development environment. As a result of some early well failures and associated sand production, TesTrak© pressure data acquired during re-drilling some of the wells has provided an invaluable insight into the complexities of deepwater reservoir development and thin vs thick bed recovery efficiencies. This has led to further development optimization such as the deployment of SMART water injection completions and dedicated thin bed high angle wells as required to solve specific by-passed oil targets. In this paper, the above challenges and reservoir management (RMP) requirements combined with the concerns of the optimized water flooding in a complex deep water field in Malaysia have been studied and discussed.