The objective of this paper is to present a directional drilling approach and the technical solution used to overcome directional challenges during landing horizontal section in Carbonate Baturaja of Offshore North West Java. The main directional challenge is the limited directional space to be able landing with 85-degree inclination +/- 3'TVD inside Top Carbonate Baturaja formation since the target landing coordinate is pretty much close to the platform. The precision in hitting landing point is very critical, firstly because there is a high possibility trajectory become a "hook" considering the lateral section is only 20’ TVD below the top Baturaja. The other well requirements/conditions also make directional work even more challenging such as collision issue at the surface interval, the ability to kick off in very soft formation, the uncertainty of Top Baturaja that affect space for directional work from kick-off to landing, and space tangent section for ESP placement to prevent ESP failure during production. The integrated directional approach starts from the preparation phase during initiating the feasible trajectory and conducts pre-rig move work such as enhancing data survey quality of the offset well, choosing the best available surface slot, selecting a type of trajectory including the option of negative section trajectory (Pregnant Lady) to add more space for directional and the necessary of the pilot hole, and then conduct the assessment for some worse case scenarios based on challenges. The next step is more to BHA tool selections to enhance the success ratio and give more versatility if the worst-case scenarios happened including developing a landing strategy decision tree. The last step is monitoring strategy during the execution and live updating the directional plan based on actual progress and doing the replan to ensure landing as per plan. Geo-steering was implemented while drilling in the horizontal section for accurate well placement into the very thin Carbonate Baturaja reservoir (+/- 30-50 ft TVD) which is also known as total loss circulation formation. The implementation of this integrated directional approach requires good coordination among the team involved in achieving technical excellence. In the execution phase, by adhering to the project management process developed including the decision tree and the mitigations, ZUG-X was successfully constructed to hit the landing point as per target without inducing any safety incident and related Non-Productive Time (NPT). Moreover, this became the first negative section well drilled in a horizontal well in North West Java and could be implemented in the future.
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Yuda et al. (2024) studied this question.