Addressing Reservoir Management, Operational Challenges and Strategic Planning Utilizing the Dynamic Model of the Worlds’ Largest Clastic Reservoir - The Wara-Burgan

To sustain oil production, the Wara-Burgan reservoirs have undergone massive drilling and water-injection over the past decade, leading to 1000s of new wells. These introduced several reservoir management and operational challenges, including localized pressure depletion, formation of secondary gas-cap, non-uniform water encroachment, by-passed oil formation, and fluid property changes. This paper focuses on identifying, analyzing, and evaluating the impact of these factors on reservoir management decisions using calibrated dynamic model across the Greater Burgan field. To analyze and assess the reservoir management challenges with eight stacked reservoirs having 2400+ wells coupled under 14 gathering-centers, an integrated and up-to-date dynamic model was deemed indispensable, to provide a holistic picture of the reservoir performance. The dynamic model history matching was performed successfully by including all the available drilling, workover, production, injection, pressure, and surveillance data for newly drilled and existing wells. The update of history match exercise was conducted on the existing dynamic model for Wara and Burgan reservoirs to achieve field, gathering center and reservoir level matches. The history matched dynamic model was subsequently used in simulating field development strategies, asset-action plans, and conducting high-resolution sector modeling of the Greater Burgan reservoirs. A comprehensive list of multiple forecasting and development options was mutually agreed with the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) asset team. These were simulated whilst honoring all available data and information pertaining to wells and facilities, including their respective constraints. Further variations to the simulation cases, including focused work on the Ahmadi ridge and Northern Burgan area were all simultaneously performed. Simulation cases related to testing the system capacity limit for the entire field as well as implementation of horizontal wells to target the sweet spots in the Middle and Lower sands were completed in addition. This work was in part, used for proof-of-concept modelling pertaining to simultaneous injection and production, within the Wara-Burgan reservoir. This invariably led to a decision for facility re-assignment with respect to availing injection slots, for utilization in the field for water injection. This work further formulates the asset strategy to develop all operational reservoirs of the Greater Burgan field with given and foreseeable constraints in view of the strategic objectives of KOC.