Production Profiling of a Long Dead Well - A Prime Case Study of Operational and Technical Excellence Using Simultaneous Lifting and Logging Services

ABSTRACT

Reservoir surveillance and production optimization will remain at the forefront of company strategies in the new post-COVID19 environment. We anticipate that companies will focus more on producing assets and go the route of production enhancement rather than exploration. Accordingly, production logging will remain an important surveillance method in evaluating and strategizing production-optimization schemes pertaining to flow-characterization from reservoir-to-wellbore. This work is culmination of operational and technical excellence that enabled the revival of a loaded-up well through simultaneous lifting-and-logging technique. Conventionally, wireline is the preferred mode of conveyance for production-logging;however, well must be continuously flowing throughout acquisition timeframe. Kicking-off the well using nitrogen-lift and then bringing in wireline-unit for production-logging in Well A-4 was not feasible as previous attempts confirmed well to load-up in few hours post-offloading. Therefore, success of this project was heavily dependent on initial planning stage, which accounted for all available data including production-history, well-events, intervention-details, fluid analysis and well load-up behavior. Next, a multi-domain approach was adopted while bringing-out each domain from its silos and strategize collectively to simultaneously kickoff the well with nitrogen and acquire real-time downhole production-logging data through smart-coiled-tubing (CT). This was first implementation of concurrent lifting and logging operation in Pakistan. By deploying the approach mentioned above through smart CT (using optical-telemetry-link inside the CT-string coupled with downhole-assembly), synchronized lifting-and-logging operation was carried-out successfully. Well was observed to swiftly go back to load-up conditions post-kickoff;however, continuous well dynamics monitoring downhole enabled us to log perforated interval across multiple time domains. Well was activated through CT nitrogen-injection but depicted continuous loading tendency, which was captured downhole in form of flow-transients. Real-time job optimization ensured vigilant monitoring and selection of right-time to acquire meaningful zonal-contribution data for evaluation and diagnostic solutions. Finally, operational excellence was complemented through technical data analysis and interpretation, integrating passes data with transients and stationary measurements. Ultimately, acquired data analyzed using an integrated lens involving fluid velocities, downhole density, temperature, and water hold up data. Consequently, enabling us to decipher gas and water-entries on a zonal-basis across perforated sandstone reservoir. Copyright © 2022, Society of Petroleum Engineers.