Robust and Fit-for-Purpose Sand Control Technology to Produce Marginal Reserves in EKP

Abstract

East Kalimantan Petroleum (EKP) is an oil and gas exploration and production company which operates in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Development of mature fields was aiming shallow unconsolidated sand-stone reservoirs which have high sand risk character. The proportion of shallow wells development compared to the main zone wells is tend to increase recently which has natural consequences of the increasing trend of sand-produced volume along with the hydrocarbon production. The sand grains abrasive physical property may cause consequences of a detrimental to the short-long-term productivity of oil and/or gas well. It can damage the hydrocarbon-contained surface facilities, and even causes a serious to catastrophic safety accident. The loss of containment leads might be followed by deadly disaster, such as fire and environment pollutions. The company currently produces these reservoirs type by applying the robust diesel-based chemical sand-consolidation (DB-SCON) technology for high stakes reservoirs and combined with the mechanical sand-screens application for the low stakes reservoirs. Along the field’s production period, the trend of a shallow unconsolidated reservoir’s average reserves is decreasing which lead to the declining trend of sand-control project economics. The company forms a project team under well intervention department to perform the research with the mission to find the new robust and fit-for-purpose sand-control technology application to produce the marginal reserves. The root causes analysis using current reality tree (CRT) reveals the three main factors of this economics declines trend: high chemical sand-consolidation investment cost, low-productivity and low-reliability of current mechanical sand-screen. The Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) defines the most robust and fit-for-purpose sand-control technology among the proposed alternatives: water-based chemical sand-consolidation (WB-SCON), high erosion resistance sand-screen (HERSS) and sand management (SM) technologies. As the result, the HERSS technology is chosen as the best solution among the alternatives. The field trials result compares HERSS performance to current robust DB-SCON. HERSS significantly reduces the investment cost by 68.0%, maintaining the reliability or success at 88.2% (DB-SCON recorded as 88.5%), maintaining the productivity at 2.5 MMscfd (gas production), accelerates the production two weeks earlier, and reduce the economic cut-off reserve limit from 0.1 down to 0.02 BCF. HERSS (made by zircon metal) technology is capable to significantly improve the performance of the mechanical sand-screen (Ceramic screen as current base-case). It increases the reliability from 64.7% to 88.5%, decrease the investment cost by 30.7%. The HERSS industrialization is planned in 2023 to replace current sand-control technology that potentially will generate significant economic improvement from the investment cost reduction with a total of $27.4 million.