Abstract
Cost of hydrocarbon resources development in Malaysia is escalating. Typical overall unit development costs are now ranging from 30 to 50 $/Bbl. With this trend of cost escalating, marginal fields or remaining reserves from brown fields may not be economically developed.
This presentation is first to demonstrate effective cost saving by reducing well count with case studies in thin oil-rim and compartmentalized reservoirs in Malaysia. It then illustrates the feasibility of further reducing the well construction cost by changing the well design culture and production strategy. This entails designing slimmer holes and having monobore well completion design for gas reservoirs, the application of ICD and ICV for enhance commingle production from multilayer reservoirs rather than the designing conventional but complex multiple-strings completion wells. Significant cost saving can also be achieved by improving drilling and completion efficiency. The idea of setting up minimum performance standards for drilling and completion and the resultant well construction cost will also be discussed.
Cost of constructing conventional offshore surface structure to support the reservoir production is relatively 3 to 5 folds the cost of the associated well construction. For marginal fields, an idea of developing smaller FPSO but with the capability of coiled tubing drilling and completion will also be presented.
This presentation is the herald urging a paradigm change of the way we were in developing our resources and encourages cost saving as an integrated engineering effort involving reservoir engineering, well design engineering, well drilling and completion engineering, and production facilities engineering.
