Publications

The Bawal Field is a Miocene Arang sandstone dry gas field located in Block B, South Natuna Sea. It was discovered in 1979 by Conoco Indonesia Inc. with the Bawal-1 exploration well, and later appraised with the Bawal-2 well resulting in the identification of six stacked reservoir zones. Commerciality was not established until 1999 when a gas market became available and development of several gas fields in the area was initiated. Development of the Bawal Field is a secondary phase project with first production in 2012. This is due to its relatively small size and location about 40 kilometers away from the nearest central gathering and processing facility which has a major impact on the operability, development cost and ultimately the expected recovery factor. The distance of the Bawal Field from infrastructure together with relatively small gas volumes and multiple pay zones led to the primary drivers for the optimum economic development to be maintaining low development costs, and a carefully optimized completion strategy. Horizontal production wells completed in single zones have proved highly successful in similar Arang dry gas developments in the area resulting in good overall recovery factors. Commingled wells have been less successful, primarily due to water production from one zone impacting the overall well performance and thereby resulting in loss of recovery from the non-watered-out zones. This emphasized the importance of a careful completion strategy for Bawal. Two development wells have been put on production in mid 2012, BW-01 and BW-02. An Intelligent Well System (IWS) was applied in BW -01 with seven individually completed reservoir zones. BW-02 is a horizontal well completed in zone-2. This paper discusses the processes adopted by the Bawal development team to optimize the Bawal Field development, with particular emphasis on the subsurface evaluation and the strategy adopted resulting in the decision to install Intelligent Well System (IWS) technology.