A successful ongoing cycle of optimization, unlocking opportunities and expanding development has enabled Western Desert fields not only to achieve production levels that assure asset value but also set the area on a growth path through expansion beyond original scope.
The Western Desert is located between Libya-Egypt and the Agiba/IEOC production started in 1984. The historical and main producing oil formation is Bahareyia, a shallow reservoir composed of unconsolidated sand layers with gross thickness of 50 ft and oil density ranging from 30°-40° API. However, the deep reservoir targets have improved their contribution in the last years driven by successful exploration and the increase in gas treatment facilities.
The peculiarity of play drove the distinctive exploration/reservoir synergy, which consists on near field appraisal with a time to market competitive with a standard development well in the Western Desert. Such approach allows continually discovering new resources and constantly renew/enlarge the field basket to sustain/enhance production. The tangible result reflects on a stable oil production over 30 years of history and its ramp-up in the last decade.
In this framework, the Western Desert gas debottlenecking will be a key factor to fully exploit the deep reservoir potential. In order to accomplish such task new infilling and facilities upgradation would need to be taken into account.
The paper want to present the peculiar exploration & reservoir approach aiming to unlock resource and the plan for gas debottlenecking.
An overview of the recent deepening campaign is presented and afterwards an insight toughing the main future project foreseen in the Western Desert.
In March 2018 a full wellbore revision was carried out for the Western Desert with the aim to identify new opportunity. The results of such analysis was the identification of an oil bearing level in AEB-IIIE & AEB-IIID in the central part of the field.
The development plan started with the drilling of a new dedicated well targeting the area of interest. The exploration/reservoir intuition was confirmed by a well production exceeding 4'000 bopd.
Afterwards, a screening of the entire existing well targeting shallow target in the zone was performed resulting in the identification of possible candidate for deepening.
