Fashioning the Increase of Oil and Gas Production through Advanced Cased Hole Formation Evaluation

Abstract

Freshwater environment and high clay content are quite common in Indonesia. This introduces certain challenge in performing hydrocarbon identification and evaluation especially in already cased wells. In old producer wells, possible conditions such as fluid channeling behind casing and trapped hydrocarbon in annulus add more complexity in performing behind casing analysis to understand current reservoir condition. In order to increase the success in finding remaining hydrocarbon potential, PERTAMINA has deployed pulsed neutron logs (PNL) to accurately pinpoint the targeted interval for perforation. Since 2017, the PNL campaign has covered approximately 160 wells in PERTAMINA's development fields across Indonesia up until now. PNL service offers nuclear-based statistical measurement such as sigma, thermal neutron decay porosity (TPHI), and carbon-oxygen yield that allows simultaneous oil and gas saturation evaluation without any dependence on water salinity and other electrical properties of the formation and fluid. It also allows computation of elemental dry weight from elemental spectroscopy data which can be utilized to determine lithology to complement the standard open-hole logs dataset. The more advanced PNL tool raises the bar even further by offering new measurement of fast neutron capture cross section (FNXS) log which is useful to identify gas even in tight rock formation. The latest generation also features self-compensation algorithm resulting in more robust TPHI and sigma log under complex circumstances such as multi-casing/tubing. This paper showcases several prominent success stories of oil and gas findings identified from PNL interpretation in development wells. There are also several examples of elemental spectroscopy data utilization from PNL to prevent non-economical perforation by means of providing accurate lithology and porosity analysis as compared to previous result built from old and/or incomplete open-hole logs dataset. This PNL campaign has also given valuable insights of borehole and reservoir condition which might have been overlooked such as hydrocarbon in annulus, low pressure gas zone identification and batman's ear boundary effect. Low pressure gas zone may be qualitatively identified whenever TPHI from PNL is noticeably lower than neutron porosity measurement from the open-hole log. Batman's ear effect is usually observed when a body of sand is sandwiched between carbonaceous shales or coal layers resulting successive oil-water-oil saturation profile in one homogenous body of sand, shown as oil peaks at the bed boundaries similar with the appearance of batman's ear. As the sand gets thinner, these two oil peaks might merge into one solid body of high oil saturation which might not depict the true oil potential of the sand.