Offshore Rigless Coiled Tubing Operations Drives a Paradigm Shift of Cost-Effective Interventions in Gulf of Suez, Egypt

Abstract Gulf of Suez is one of the prolific Oil that requires barge or rig assistance to accommodate the necessary coiled tubing equipment. Few trials across history were made to do rigless coiled tubing operations in larger platforms that may have crane to support coiled tubing record, however these practices were stopped due to tedious and heavy logistics, and limited capabilities of the set up that operations were limited to jetting operations. Adding the cost of barge or rig to coiled tubing operations drives the cost high and restrict the applicability to high certainty value intervention and many other uncertain opportunities will be overlooked due to inherent cost. In order to give chance to do moderate to high operationally risky wells with high uncertainty in subsurface value it was necessary to find alternative rigless approaches. During 2022 & 2023 a multidisciplinary analysis was done to explore innovative options to do rigless coiled tubing operations considering all the constraints through layout optimization, new technology to accommodate coiled tubing rig ups and logistics optimization & comparative evaluation of different options to deliver cost effective intervention. Many of the locations analyzed were confirmed feasible for the new setup of offshore rigless interventions and proof of concept campaigns commenced testing the operations on larger platforms then smaller ones. by the time of writing the abstract 4 Coiled tubing campaigns were completed rigless and succeeded to add more than 6500 BOPD & achieve savings of more than 10 M. Revision of well intervention strategies and procedures in mature offshore fields can lead to a huge cost saving as well as a production leap.