Abstract
Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) is running two pilot projects in South Ratqa Field to evaluate steam injection using cyclic steam stimulation (CSS) and steam flooding (SF) methods. These projects are the first of their kind in KOC history and one of the major milestones in the North Kuwait Heavy Oil Development.
Two large-scale thermal pilot (LSTP) projects are located north and south of the South Ratqa Field, with the north running two different areas of 10 and 5 acres and well completion and the south running one area of 5 acres.
KOC has been injecting steam in these pilots in an unconsolidated high viscous formation since 2015, beginning with a CSS process that migrating to SF during the second half of 2017. A fundamental goal to help ensure success with this type of project is carefully monitoring the injected steam per well and per formation layer by installing fiber optic distributed temperature sensing (DTS) and pressure gauges in a portion of the wells; this goal was defined at the beginning of the project. For this purpose, 12 wells were drilled as observation wells and 6 idle wells were used for fiber-optic deployment to monitor the reservoir 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the injection life of the pilots. The observation wells with DTS and pressure gauges were distributed along the pilots to cover a large predetermined observation area for the pilots.
The observation wells with DTS and pressure gauges in the north and south LSTP areas were also distributed along these pilots to cover a large area. The benefits of installing this technology in the pilots are to:
To develop an understanding of steam breakthrough zones along the pay-zone interval of production wells
To help improve the understanding of the steam injection profile for steam-injector wells
To help improve the real-time temperature profile along the length of producer’s wellbore
To develop an understanding of heat management during steam flooding
This paper discusses the success story between two companies installing DTS and thermal pressure gauges and includes a description of DTS, the installation procedure of downhole and surface equipment, real-time data transfer, and data analysis.
