Kuwait's resources and reserves to date are characterized by giant, large, massive oil and gas fields located in onshore and offshore areas of Kuwait. These fields are under different stages of development like natural depletion, pressure maintenance and enhance oil recovery (EOR) processes. Over the years, huge amount of resources and reserves data has been accumulated from these fields. This has made Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) to re-evaluate its approaches towards management of these huge volumes of data efficiently. With passage of time, it has become more challenging to manage these reserves and resources volumes and promotions to meet company's growth strategies.Historically, KOC was managing its resources and reserves through a manual Reserves Management System (RMS) spreadsheets for tracking, archiving, monitoring, reporting and managing the resources and reserves.With time, RMS has become a very complex and involved process and it was felt necessary to introduce a new process and tool to manage the overall RMS workflow efficiently to meet company's business needs. Accordingly, KOC decided to introduce a systematic workflow tool to streamline the process of managing hydrocarbon resources and reserves data. The new workflow process consist of a robust multiusers database for archiving, managing and reporting which can be accessed by different teams at different security levels. This enhanced system enabled KOC's management and reserves evaluators to optimize the company's resources and identifying possible opportunities to meets its strategic goals.
A countrywide benchmarking of ultimate recovery factor (URF) for oil reservoirs in Kuwait is presented in this study. The results of this study have been useful to support identification of long-term opportunities and have influenced the creation of conceptual development plans for some of the newly discovered prospects of the company. The Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) has a diverse inventory of petroleum reservoirs having a wide range of geologic age, depth, reservoir complexity, and development maturity. This study focused on the reservoir complexity index (RCI) method and global analogs to identify development opportunities and improvements to the URF in the brown and green fields of Kuwait. A customized benchmarking workflow was developed to assess the URF of approximately 100 conventional oil reservoirs. First, a detailed 17-parameter RCI factor and a simplified 7-parameter RCI factor were developed. These two RCI methods were then validated against simulation-estimated URF from waterflood development for the study reservoirs. Next, the two RCI factors were used to benchmark URF for study reservoirs against the company's peers and against global analogs having best practices in operations. Finally, a set of benchmarking dashboards were refined to identify reservoir-complexity concerns, comparisons of company and global peers, and identification of potential upsides or risks in URF. Comparison of higher performing global analogs to the company's reservoirs with similar RCI resulted in identification of additional development opportunities and upsides in URF.
Kuwait Oil Company is presently working on number of fronts to increase its reserve base to meet the future strategic requirements of the country. The major challenge is to continuously work on improving the overall recovery from the existing reservoirs. For achieving this goal, Reservoir Management Technical Limit study (RMTL) process was undertaken to estimate the true potentials of a number of reservoirs of KOC which are under various stages of development. RMTL is a structured, facilitated, documented process at which multi-disciplinary teams and independent experts review the depletion plan for a reservoir and identifying reserve growth opportunities to its technical limit. The RMTL study was carried out to assess the potential of Sabriyah (Upper Burgan) reservoir in North Kuwait asset of Kuwait Oil Company. This reservoir is currently in the second stage of development with activities like development drilling, water injection for pressure maintenance. In order to assess the viability of different EOR processes and eliminate technically unviable process, the analytical screening was done. Finally, a few representative pattern elements from the full field simulation model were extracted for use in the EOR screening. The EOR screening exercise has shown potential for low salinity water flood, surfactant polymer and potentials for miscible CO2 injection. Incremental recovery factors up to 13% are predicated compared with conventional water flooding. These studies have given a direction to the company to decide on economically viable EOR processes in different reservoirs of Kuwait.
Oil companies are facing several challenges from external and internal environment like volatility of crude oil price, capex reduction, subsurface uncertainty, delay in the surface facilities etc. that impacts the long-term strategic plans. Kuwait Oil Company (KOC)'s annual Asset Action Plan (AAP) operationalizes the long-term strategy of the company assurance of annual AAP is key for having a credible forecast and meeting long term goals. A robust Corporate Assurance process has been developed that consists of workflows that will guarantee company's ability to develop and execute credible field development plans. A review on proper planning, execution and alignment of different business processes is required during assurance of Asset Action Plan. This assurance process provides confidence to the management in approving the AAP. Opportunity based Asset Action Plan (AAP) process is the backbone of KOC's annual business planning and portfolio management system. This allows alternative portfolio choices and management can make the right decision. The opportunity will provide consistency and clarity of the Portfolio constituents and common rational basis for investment decision making and allow for alignment between the KOC major business processes. AAP process is carried out annually and is initiated through high level business guidelines management. During finalization of AAP, an assurance review by corporate technical team for large national companies having multiple assets is considered as best practices that support management in approving the AAP and to steer the company in right direction. AAP Assurance process involves reviewing the forecast with the historical performance of the reservoir, planned activities, expected outcomes from the activities, feasibility and associated cost. A systematic three stage process has been adopted to conduct AAP Assurance for reservoirs which are at different phases of development. This assurance workflow and methodology helps to align changing oil and gas scenarios, different business process, health of the reservoirs and meeting future production targets. This process ensures that proposed AAP plan will be able to deliver production target commitments and identify any gaps and propose mitigation plans. This also confirms that ongoing development plans are in alignment with facility planning. It also validates conformance of the adopted reservoir development and management workflows with global best practices (analogue reservoirs) to maximize recovery and maintaining health of reservoir.
Management of oil and gas resources and reserves has always been complex process as the company’s portfolio consists of resource and reserves volumes with varying degrees of uncertainty and maturity levels of projects. Some of the hydrocarbon volumes are from resources that are highly uncertain and require technology imprevoments or breakthroughs. However, for strategy formulation of the country/company needs consideration of all hydrocarbon volumes that can generate value in the future. The prioritization of development strategies for its reservoirs based on rigorous technical and economic assessments while protecting the national interests is a challenging task. Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) has been using multiple systems for both asset and business planning processes that is not optimized for faster turnaround. The proposed integrated and automated reserves management solution provided a structured environment for systematic economic evaluation and portfolio optimization. It facilitates the visualization of key reservoir parameters delivering full understanding of the forecasted reserves, production and economic potential of the entire company. It indentifies gaps between reserves and detailed development plans based on technical and commercial criteria. By Optimizing the project timing and economics results in reduction of budgetary expences, increase in portfolio revenue and greater confidence for the company. Ranking the investment opportunities helps in allocating resources appropriately amongst different projects in a systemic manner to ensure profitability of the company. This approach provides ease to KOC in modeling complex scenarios and quickly evaluate a wide range of different development strategies catering for risk and uncertainty This paper describes current industry challenges in resource and reservoir management, and an integrated approach to reserves, economics and portfolio management envisioned for Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) which will assist in identifying optimal reservoir development options to meet any defined strategic goals. The results and benefits gained after deployment of pilot will also be explained in the paper. This integrated approach for optimization of Asset Action Plans is a unique solution and would prove beneficial for our industry.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.