Testing Methodology for Smart Wells Completion toward Attaining Optimal Production Rate Setting for Maximum Hydrocarbon Recovery

Every oil company strives to produce its fields smartly, effectively and efficiently to ensure maximum recovery and minimize any unrecovered reserves. Being the largest integrated oil company with the most reserves, Saudi Aramco is in the forefront of such efforts by utilizing real time data and controls, also referred in our industry as smart or intelligent wells and controls. Some of these efforts are evident from the recent development of Haradh III increment (2006); part of Ghawar field, which is considered to be the world’s first fully intelligent field1. Even prior to that, individual intelligent field ventures started in many fields and Safaniya, the world’s largest offshore oil field, is not new to that. Safaniya holds a wide range of intelligent field equipment and is expected to be fully automated in the near future. Completing wells with smart completion jewelry is one such effort. With an increasing number of smart well completions in Safaniya, the need is to ensure the maximum benefit is gained from them and the completion design is optimized early on. This paper is an effort to detail the procedure adopted to conduct the first test on smart well completions in one of Saudi Arabia’s offshore fields. The paper details the processes and practices of testing smart well completions for inflow performance and capacity of all laterals and the operation of the downhole valves. To evaluate the completion practices in horizontal multilateral wells followed by simulation runs with various completion configurations, the test was run for two different wells with two different completion configurations. This practice helped optimize design completion (tubing size, number of multilaterals) of dual lateral wells with inflow control valves (ICVs) to maximize production.