With the Oil business expanding day by day and with the demand for oil increasing many challenges were introduced, Kuwait Oil Company's South-East Asset (SEK) played a major role in tackling those challenges to meet Kuwait Petroleum Company production targets. In order to ensure operational excellence strategy is implemented, multidisciplinary teams founded (Well Delivery Task Force Team) to ensure the optimization of production and the full utilization of resources available in order to heed for the KPC requirements. Today Well Delivery TFT has grown to become a symbol of defining success criteria, which goes beyond technology implementation and setting the right framework for efficiency, coordination & commitment by ensuring an effective synergy between different teams of SEK directorate. Before the Task Force was formed the teams encountered several barriers to centralization plans. Challenges like inter-dependencies, miscommunications, understanding size, time and type of operation workflows, materials availability created strong barriers to an effective plan implementation. This lead to substandard work outcome due to conveying message between one parts of the team to multiple teams located in different locations resulting in time and effort waste and eventually deviate from the desired application. As SEK core business is to meet expected oil targets, it is critical to ensure that the company standards or work practices are preserved and applied irrespective of the challenges.
The Greater Burgan Field is the oldest producing oil field of Kuwait. Till date, more than 1200 wells have been drilled in the field. Construction of surface production facilities, power line corridors, roads as well as office and housing complexes for its employees have put severe constraints on surface locations for drilling new wells. A fault block in the Ahmadi ridge that was expected to be geologically very prospective for hydrocarbon accumulation could not be accessed for a long time as it was below the Kuwait Oil Company's office complexes. Structural complexity and poor quality of seismic data around that area also added to the uncertainty. To reach the producing Wara and Burgan sands, the wells have to be drilled through the carbonate Dammam, Radhuma and Tayarat formations which are potential loss zones – more often than not leading to total mud loss. Deviated wells drilled so far in the field were, therefore, restricted to a maximum inclination of 45 degrees with the kick-off point located as deep as possible to minimize losses. This put a severe constraint on the horizontal drift achieved at pay zone level. Two high-angle deviated wells were successfully planned and drilled with inclinations of 50 degrees or more with shallow kick-off depths to achieve a horizontal drift of upto 1 km to reach the hydrocarbons locked up below the company office complexes. The higher inclinations also helped in maximizing the reservoir contact and net pay of more than 100 ft was encountered in both the wells.
The Greater Burgan Field in Kuwait consists of three culminations – Burgan Dome in the south, Ahmadi in the northeast and Magwa in the northwest. The Cretaceous Burgan Formation is the main reservoir of the Greater Burgan Field. The major part of the reservoir consists of massive, stacked, fluvial channels with an active bottom water drive. The structure is dissected by a number of faults resulting in compartmentalization of the reservoir. The major faults are easily mappable with seismic data. However, mapping the minor faults is a challenge due to velocity anomalies present in the shallow formations masking the structural picture at the Burgan Formation level. Hydrocarbon saturation logs are widely used in the field to monitor the movement of the oil-water contact (OWC). At many places, uneven OWC rise is observed, that cannot be attributed to different offtakes from the wells. Time-lapse mapping of the OWC by different vintages of hydrocarbon saturation logs, in combination with open hole logs, shows that these differences can only be explained by sub-compartmentalization along structural discontinuities. Such discontinuities are mostly observed in the Magwa area where shallow velocity anomalies are also more pronounced. Mapping the trends of these discontinuities shows that they are aligned to the regional fault trends mapped seismically. Using this technique, a number of minor faults can be mapped that sub-divides the major compartments into smaller ones. This will help in better positioning of in-fill locations and also in refining the production strategy of the compartments.
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